Real-Time Generative Company

Who we are

The Shader team specializes in real-time generative technology, focusing on creating lifelike virtual characters with advanced animations, effects, filters, and lenses.

The company was founded by Darya Sesitskaya, a former Snap design lead responsible for designing Snapchat’s AR camera, Lens Studio, Lens Cloud, and more. She also worked at Wanna (formerly Wannaby), an AR technology company known for its virtual try-ons for sneakers, clothing, and watches. Shader’s team includes former Snap AR and Blizzard engineers.

The company’s flagship product, which launched in beta on iOS devices in December 2023, is a real-time AI camera app. Users take a photo for the app to scan their faces and enter a prompt for the AI to generate a personalized AR effect, allowing them to record videos wearing the mask or filter.

In terms of funding, Shader has raised $610,000 from Betaworks, Greycroft, Differential Ventures, Mozilla Ventures, On Deck, and Pablo Stanley (a Kleiner Perkins scout).

🏗️ More about you:

• 0 → 1: You can rapidly build new products that empower our Gen Z and Gen Alpha creators to meet their creative needs. Our users want to create on mobile instantly, without any wait, and we’re racing to keep up with their demand.
• 1 → N: You’re ready to scale current products and infra to support 100x growth.
• You want to grow and lead a technical team - this position allows for the potentially swift opportunity to grow into a CTO role and beyond!
• You thrive in early-stage startups: You are scrappy, and can work well in a fast-paced environment, and can adapt quickly to changing circumstances and meet tight deadlines. Bonus points if you’re a founder of VC-backed or bootstrapped companies.
• You are a strong communicator, care deeply about impact and access, understand Gen Z, and have a good sense of humor. You’re excited about our mission to help students of all backgrounds learn about themselves and share their story with the world.
• Experience building with tools like vector databases, Langchain, RAG, multi-agentic frameworks, running model evals, prompt engineering

Responsibilities

You will be one of the founding members of a new engineering team focused on building no-code AR creation tool. You will take ownership around defining, planning, and crafting the overall system architectures for key product areas and driving end-to-end feature development.

To succeed in this role, you must be a strong programmer and a creative problem solver who thrives in a fast-paced environment, working across teams and organizations. In addition to engineering excellence, you should have experience in iOS development specifically, have a keen eye for the user experience, and be able to create forward looking, scalable architecture designs from evolving feature requirements.

This is a highly collaborative role with the opportunity to evolve in many directions.