ML Open Source Lead

About Ideogram

Ideogram’s mission is to make world-class design accessible to everyone, multiplying human creativity. We build proprietary generative media models and AI native creative workflows, tackling unsolved challenges in graphic design. Our team includes builders with a track record of technology breakthroughs including early research in Diffusion Models, Google’s Imagen, and Imagen Video. We care about design, taste, and craft as much as research and engineering – shipping experiences that creatives actually love.

We’ve raised nearly $100M, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. Headquartered in Toronto with a growing team in NYC, we're scaling fast, aiming to triple over the next year. We're a flat team with a culture of high ownership, collaboration, and mentorship.

Explore Ideogram 4.0, Enterprise, API, Open Source, Character and Custom Models blog posts, and try Ideogram at ideogram.ai.

About The Role

The open-source ML leader serves as a bridge between Ideogram’s internal research teams and the broader AI ecosystem. This person will be tasked with turning foundational research into usable, high-quality public tooling, while actively growing and maintaining a healthy developer community.

Responsibilities:

• Open-Source Strategy: Define and execute a vision for releasing open model weights, methodologies, and code.

• Community Leadership: Oversee GitHub and Huggingface repositories.

• Advocacy & Outreach: Champion open science by building open source demos (e.g. implementing lora fine-tuning for our models), writing technical blogs, answering questions from the community, and presenting at conferences.

• Ecosystem Collaboration: Partner with model providers, internal engineers, and external contributors to push AI accessibility forward.

• Research-to-Release: Convert internal, proprietary implementations into polished open-source code, ensuring quality, reproducibility, and ease of use for the community.

What We’re Looking For:

• Advanced degree or equivalent research experience in Machine Learning or Deep Learning, or a related field

• Uses personal and professional platforms to amplify open research initiatives and invite collaboration

• Strong hands-on experience in Python and ML research libraries such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow

• Familiarity with LLMs and modern deep learning architectures (e.g., Transformers, diffusion models, reinforcement learning with human feedback)

• Experience publishing research or working on open-source projects in ML, computer vision, or NLP

• Excellent communicator who enjoys engaging with the developer and open source community

• Passion for open source projects and community-driven research/tooling

• Great communication skills

• Willing to dive into things quickly, pick up new tools from the open source community, and enjoys exploring new ideas

Our Culture

We’re a team of exceptionally talented, curious builders who love solving tough problems and turning bold ideas into reality. We move fast, collaborate deeply, and operate without unnecessary hierarchy, because we believe the best ideas can come from anyone.

Everyone at Ideogram rolls up their sleeves to make our products and our customers successful. We thrive on curiosity, creativity, and shared ownership. We believe that small, dedicated teams working together with trust and purpose can move faster, think bigger, and create amazing things.

Ideogram is committed to welcoming everyone — regardless of gender identity, orientation, or expression. Our mission is to create belonging and remove barriers so everyone can create boldly.

What We Offer

💸Competitive compensation and equity designed to recognize the value and impact of your contributions to Ideogram’s success.
🌴 4 weeks of vacation to recharge and explore.
🩺 Comprehensive health, vision, and dental coverage starting on day one.
💰 RRSP/401(k) with employer match up to 4% to invest in your future from the moment you join.
💻 Top-of-the-line tools and tech to fuel your creativity and productivity.
📍 Toronto HQ perks: Steps from Union Station and the PATH, with daily in-office lunches and dinners.
🔍 Autonomy to explore and experiment — whether you’re testing new ideas, running large-scale experiments, or diving into research, you’ll have access to compute/resources you need when there’s a clear business or creative use case. We encourage curiosity and bold thinking.
🌱 A culture of learning and growth, where curiosity is encouraged and mentorship is part of the journey.