Be part of a growth machine.

Polarr strives to attract smart and enterprising creatives that are as invested in the success of the company as they are in professional growth. We are passionate, as a startup, in empowering the success of every individual through the development of their leadership abilities, entrepreneurial passions, and professional skillsets.

We aspire to create a work environment that maps Polarr's success to each team member, creating opportunities for practice, encouraging new ideas, and trusting in the process of growth. This way, when a fellow team member is ready to venture out, they are prepared to tackle the challenges of creating their own idea of a living and breathing growth machine.

  • 21
    Total employees at Polarr
  • 18
    Employees who want to become entrepreneurs
  • 3
    Employees who are ex-Founders or CEOs

When it comes to working, I always want to be challenged, yet work on something that’s fulfilling and in an environment that promotes personal growth. I found that and more when I joined Polarr in early 2017. At the time, Polarr was a small team of maybe around ten people distributed around the globe. Everyone brought a unique skill to the table and was more than willing to share those skills with everyone else at Polarr. Those early days were exciting because you quickly learned new things and worked in areas that might not have been in your wheelhouse before. Thankfully, Polarr has managed to keep that pioneering environment while growing over the last few years. I’m happy to be still a part of this diverse team where everyone puts their best work forward every day.
Sam Sabri
Head of Community at Polarr.
I was looking specific things in companies to be a part of after I left my two earlier companies. Polarr had interesting apps, but the internal software dev toolkit page coined, "Vision Engine" was a keyword that showed that a Photo Editor Application had breadth and a scope I didn't normally realize. To empower a new kind of forefront. AI/Visual manipulation was new to me at the time and I knew I had to be a part of this venture. I always had ideas regarding both, but I have not been enabled to enact them. Polarr, provided a road to do just that. Coming from projects I started from the ground up, I know what ownership felt and I wanted to keep this thrill alive. I felt Polarr, would help with that and it has and it remains sustained.
Ritesh Pakala
iOS Engineer
Work on one audacious goal,

Our Vision - A world where there is no barrier to inspirations, no judgement to self-expressions, no limit to where creativity can be applied.

We believe the visual medium is a crucial dimension within our everyday language, allowing intangibles, like emotion, the opportunity to be even more effectively portrayed. This element of communication is still largely untapped- the majority of users struggle to find/create personalized styles; rendering particular expressions in specific moments, collaging content, and remixing visual media, are still arduous undertakings.


Thus, Polarr is creating an ecosystem around visual styles that allow creators to express themselves and ignite the creative sparks in others. We provide creators A.I. tools that support, relieve, and encourage the enduring and unique expression of creative styles, meanwhile building the world's largest community for visual styles to be universally accessible.

with remarkable people,

Polarr‘s people are technically savvy and yet full of creative flair. We are a community of creative quants, or quantitative creatives deeply integrated where we enjoy sharing our passions, even encouraging one another to become polymaths or experts in new crafts.

  • 21
    Total employees at Polarr
  • 19
    Total film cameras owned by employees
  • 8
    Languages we could speak
  • 5
    Nationalities
  • 3
    Online Influencers

Want to know more about our outside passions? Ranging from "beginner 🥉" to "Amatuers 🥈" to "enthusiast 🥇", here is a brief hobby skill-level survey of the team. Note that skill level evaluations are subjective to each individual, for each one of the hobby below, we have at least one "hardcore" individual beyond the "enthusiast" specturem on the team.


Hobbies🥉🥈🥇Total
📷 Photography44816
🕹 Video Gaming231015
📹 Video Editing35614
🎹 Music Instruments221014
🍳 Cooking32813
⛰ Hking51612
🏕 Camping42511
♟ Chess43314
🧗‍♀️ Rock Climbing52310
🎧 Audiophile2259
🧠 Meditation3238
🏋️‍♀️ Weight Training2428
⛏Wood Working4217
🎯 Shooting sport4217
🛶 Kayaking2327
🏂 Snowboarding2237
🎾 Tennis3227
🎶 Singing1247
🎨 Drawing3047
⛷ Skiing2136
👘 Fashion2136
🌊 Diving1225
🏐 Beach Volleyball2125
✨ Astronomy1225
🏎 Auto Sport0044

It’s not always easy to find a techie startup with many creative and artistic people on the team where I’m getting inspired by and also provide inspiration to everyone. But when you do find one, it is very tempting. Before joining Polarr, I was doing software development in a much larger organization and contemplating to make fashion photography a full-time career. At Polarr I see a place where I can apply my personal and professional skills to the domains I am passionate about, which is visual art and photography. These days I’m enjoying wearing a lot of different hats, and the latest one includes participating in exciting branding initiatives with the skillset I’ve learned as an Instagram influencer, and I think we will do something really cool together.
Lia Qu
TPM
I've successfully covered the office walls in scrappy prototypes, sticky notes and connected with dozens of users both new and existing in an effort to make our products better. It's an environment that is continuously evolving and as a result I'm regularly learning new skills and adopting new responsibilities. Transparency feeds into everything out team is working towards, most recently and most predominantly - inclusion and diversity. When I first started in 2018, I was one of two women working in our San Jose headquarters. Initially it was quite intimidating and I wondered how leadership felt my concerns. When I look at our team now, Polarr has and is working hard to bridge this gap, not only through listening to their people but a deeper mission to strive towards creating an environment where everyone feels equally seen and heard.
Lara Neich
Designer

Having great people is the most crucial component of Polarr's success, this includes investors who, from the outset, believed in our team and provided the financial means for us to get off the ground. Our company initially, was backed by Pear VC; in early 2019, we closed $11.5m in Series A financing backed by Threshold (formerly DFJ).

I can't think of a better opportunity than joining Polarr. I have worked with Polarr since day zero and it keeps getting better. The founding team's relentless focus on excellence can be seen all across the company: outstanding product and technology developed by a first class engineering and scientific team; focus on building a culture of collaboration and achievement; never-give-up mentality and extreme attention to detail to each individual's personal growth. It is rare to have an opportunity to join a market-defining company early and work with such a talented team.
Mar Hershenson
Founding Managing Partner, Pear VC.
Polarr is a truly exceptional group of people. They have what we see in the most compelling companies: a great sense of beauty and product elegance, coupled with an elite engineering organization. If you want to learn about the forefront of device intelligence and how to create beautiful products with a humble, fast-moving team, Polarr is for you.
Chris Kelly
Partner, Threshold Ventures
and hardcore technology.

Countless devices currently benefit from Polarr's technology (including our applications and third-party SDK distributions), over 100 million this year!

Polarr explores and adopts a broad set of new and established technologies in building consumer facing experiences. For example, we remain the only creator of image editing software that is solely powered by open web technologies on mobile and desktop. Over the years, we have been plowing through esoteric WebGL and Javascript performance limitations while also becoming the earliest adopters of CoreML and Tensorflow on mobile. Our pioneering spirit does not stop there; we ventured in-house rendering pipelines and developed patents for effect rendering based on detectable objects and QR codes that allow our creators to effortlessly distribute styles today.

To ensure we're taking advantage of new ways to improve productivity for creators, Polarr has an in-house applied research team that over time developed an internal research pipeline called CEDAR (Comprehension, Enrichment, Data, Automation, Recommendation), with the main focus on improving interactivity, real-time responsiveness, and offline visual A.I. use cases that lead directly to empowering user creativity. We specifically decided to make all of our A.I. modules executable on edge devices (smartphones, drones, etc.) to enable user experiences of lower latency, cost, higher interactivity, and better privacy protection for visual content.

Polarr's engineering and A.I. team spends significant time on productivity and automation, where our dedication has resulted in a suite of internal tools that help accelerate modeling and compression, as well as code, design experimentation and A.I. model deployment for our apps and partners. Altogether, our experience of integrating applied research, engineering and user-experience design has allowed us to create intelligent interfaces for creators to remain in creative control with the added assistance of smart algorithms.

I love the idea of Polarr being a research lab where we explore the cutting-edge technologies to inspire more people in unveiling their internal artists. Communication between talents inside our laboratory is what fuels our advancements—curiosity sparks discussions about the most complicated things in design, engineering, user interfaces, and user experiences. Joining Polarr means becoming a part of creative conversation which inevitably gives birth to artistic solutions to everyday image processing problems. Joining Polarr means becoming a part of an adventurous crew striving to discover ways of creative thinking and making it accessible to everybody.
Daniel Vershini
iOS Engineer
I was expected to work on converting scientific research to real applications, but I did not anticipate such a fast pace as well as such direct outcomes of my work. At early days, I could spend just one week to deploy a trained DL model to mobile, while our engineer could integrate and complete the AI feature in another week. As Polarr's product becomes more and more mature, we do spend more time and do more research before we officially roll out any AI feature right now, but the expectation that what I do is important and will be directly delivered to millions of consumers or big enterprise customers always make me excited about my work.
Yuhe Zhang
Head of A.I.
Impact millions of global creators,

Polarr's primary customer are creators, creator's success is our success. Today, millions of new styles are created and shared through Polarr every month, where hundreds of thousands of creators find and connect with hard-core fans who enjoy using their styles. Over the next few years, our team's primary focus is to create an ecosystem to allow style creators to be successful. This requires us to build tools that allow creators to generate a large catalogue of styles, as well as a community for creators and fanbase to engage and interact.

Visual style as a creative medium is exciting and new, and through many years of tinkering and experimentations, Polarr now attracts young, GenZ creators including tens of thousands of social influencers to distribute styles to their followers for direct use, experimentation, and remixing. Today, we believe Polarr has the largest collection of community-generated styles that millions of users rely on for their everyday visual expression.


In the future, we see our ecosystem allowing anyone with a creative desire to describe, encode, and share new visual ideas through a multitude of distribution channels in software and hardwares. As a company we want to initiate and nurture a new creator culture around styles that provides lower barriers to inspirations, less judgements to self-expressions, and fewer limits to where creativity can be applied.

Certain problems give you nightmares while you're tackling them, but extreme satisfaction once they're behind you. We wanted to move our Windows app away from Microsoft UWP framework to Electron, which in our case was more performant for users. However Electron doesn't support in-app purchases for Windows, which we rely on for our subscriptions. No open-source libraries had tackled this before. I spent a lot of time reading source code from native C++ libraries, Windows runtime API, and learning how to create native NodeJS modules. In a span of a few weeks I ended up creating a library that allowed us to wrap Windows runtime APIs and interface them with our JavaScript application. The coolest part though, is that it's Polarr's first open source project.
Md Tauseef
Fullstack Developer
As a designer, I have been working with many products related to vision and photography. I try to make using the product "Easy and Enjoyable”. At Polarr I was recently part of the redesign and reorganization of the hierarchical, layout, and user flow of styles, that users can find the entry of creating and import styles quickly. I believe my work will become the impetus of the style community and help grow the creator network. Our mix of data, user research and listening to our own intuitions gives me confidence in making decisions so that the design, product, and users can continue to grow together in the company.
Water Chen
Designer

Working with creator community gives Polarr team full of surprises and perks beyond fan-made Polarr memes and letters. Below is a set of custom mooncakes made by a creator using the design of our Polarr bear mascot.

and world class brands,

To ultimately help creators distribute styles, Polarr works with partners to further the reach and adoption of our technology in image rendering and computational photography. Polarr SDK includes a plethora of interactive creative experiences that direct power camera systems in the most popular mobile devices today.

Polarr's AI technology has helped differentiate Samsung Galaxy S10's camera experience and empowered global users to take fabulous photos easily, like a pro.
Senior Director
Samsung Research America
It has been a pleasure working with Polarr whose outstanding technology as well as people have gone above and beyond to fulfill OPPO's needs in mobile photography, videography, editing effects and visual content curation. This partnership has helped OPPO to be a leader in the smartphone photography space.
VP
OPPO America
Polarr’s technology enables millions of families to store, share, and discover beautiful memories with Western Digital’s products and solutions. We’re excited to continue to discover the possibilities of creativities we can empower our users to have.
VP
Western Digital
Polarr’s expertise in aesthetics in photography realized via edge-based AI and CV enabled new gallery experiences that were previously not possible.
Senior Director
LG
without leaving your home with 2 day WFH policy.

Polarr embraces a remote working culture many years before COVID 19 hit, in fact four first three employees were all remote and in differing timezones when the company started. This practice led us to establish early on a healthy cadence and muscle memory for scheduling, project managing, and documentation writing to ensure clarity and responsibility of work across timezones.


Today, 40% of our team lives in the Bay Area. We only ask that our local employees come to our San Jose HQ two days a week because we believe we work our best in our optimal environments. Not commuting means we spend more time outside of work with family and on our passions, and less anxiety time dealing with traffic and train schedules.


For the 60% of employees located outside the Bay Area, we fly them in each quarter and arrange accommodations within walking distance of the office. In this way, we ensure all team members around the globe have enough face-to-face time to bond and collaborate with their teams. Thus, as Polarr grows, we continue to support a diverse and international workforce locally and globally.

I used to live in the city and worked for several startups. The routine tended to be that you would come in to the office unless you thought you might be more productive at home for whatever reason, or you had to deal with life and work around it. Of course, some places are more strict than others; your mileage may vary. When I had to make my exodus from the city a couple years ago I learned the hard way how tough it could be to commute every day to work. Especially if you happen to hold the belief that you work better from the comfort of your own home and own desk anyways. I personally like getting work done on the train. For anyone with a family, the flexibility is amazing. This must be the new trend in the work place, or it should be, because Polarr out does others by having a universal Friday WFH day for everybody and then things are flexible enough to where you can pick any two days a week that you want to come to the office.
Tim Kautz
iOS Engineer
I live locally, but still an hour from the office, and Polarr's policy to only require 2 days onsite per week has been a godsend. I get to dictate my schedule, maintain a healthy work-life balance, and be more productive with my time instead of commuting. It also helps prioritize the few days I do spend in the office: I make sure to have truly meaningful conversations and collaborations with my colleagues and they're easily the highlight of my week.
Mark Paraschuk
Product Manager
Able to work from home (San Francisco) 2 days a week is a big relief for me. Having 0 commute time 2 days a week means I have more productive work time during those days. While on the other two days, I get to spend quality and effective time collaborating and socializing with my teammates to stay in the loops. It is pretty great that I get to work with a great team in SJ while keeping my lifestyle and friends in San Francisco.
Siyao Xie
iOS Engineer

Be a part of a saga with humble beginnings,

As impressive as Polarr's products and offerings may be, day-to-day operations at Polarr are brimming with challenges, from hill-climbing/roller-coaster rides to development struggles, because we're fast-moving, with a complex business model and shifting technology focus. We have smart global competitors, sky-high user expectations, and ambitious colleagues. We keep on our toes competitively, rather than rest in the comfort and security of where we are now. Thus, we invest our resources toward long-term outcomes, rather than short-term exits. Polarr is long-term greedy, in the most wonderful sense of the word.


At the same time, the building of an early-stage company is exceptionally stimulating, as each member of our team has the opportunity to touch an array of interdisciplinary projects and play multiple roles. Constantly, our engineers are picking up on the intricacies of UI design, designers learning to program interactive prototypes, and our researchers implementing findings directly into our products. Altogether, our internal structure optimizes for cross-disciplinary communication and task ownership, helping us build strong muscle memory to learn faster, and together in our ever-changing product market landscape.


Therefore, Polarr is not an ideal opportunity for those who are looking for a peace of mind, or clear-cut role in a comfortable/stable environment. Polarr is a particularly delicious opportunity for those who actively hunt for new challenges. You can read more about the interesting challenges at Polarr from our co-founders' blog post.

Polarr is an early stage company, which means that there are a variety of unique challenges, whether that be ambiguity, shifting priorities, or the fact that you are tasked with building something from scratch with limited resources and time constraints. Finding ways to overcome the challenges is a grueling yet satisfying growth opportunity. However, the most satisfying piece of all, albeit mildly terrifying, is knowing that what you do substantively impacts the direction and future of the organization for years to come.
Clement Tam
Head of People
There were many things I thought I wouldn't be able to accomplish - things that were just too hard and out of reach. I no longer think that. Working at Polarr has stretched me in ways that I would have never done on my own. I've had to tackle problems that at first seemed too complex, but was pushed to find creative solutions. This diverse and talented team is not simply focused on building great products, but also on mentoring and building great people.
Sean Kent
Fullstack Engineer
where you can continue shaping our culture.

Every new member of our team complements our company culture, which is an ever-evolving manifestation of our core values and serves as an anchoring point for navigating uncharted territories. This means we look for talent that demonstrates an affinity for excellence and upholds our shared values.

Autonomy and transparency is the backbone of any good culture. At Polarr We share every piece of context from execution strategy and tactics, risks and challenges to quarterly financials and board meeting notes. We want our team members to have active commitments on problems they genuinely care and feel passionate to solve, as opposed to passive commitments assigned by leaders or managers in the company. This means we have a free-market approach in the company when it comes to problems, and we expect each member on the team to actively initiate and ask for areas to work on and set their own goals and deadlines under the guidance of leadership, instead of waiting for tasks and new assignments.
Derek Yan
CTO
I tell everyone that our success is 70% dependent on the market, 20% on the people, 9% on the ability to understand our users, and 1% on how great the idea we have. Given people is the most important part in our success besides the macro market, the company orients itself heavily around happiness and quality of life for our employees, their careers, and ensure each employee's personal vision of life and career development stay aligned with the company's aspirations and needs.
Borui Wang
CEO

Cultural values of Polarr are reviewed every year. We don't think there is a magic number for cultural values although many companies' values come in 5s, 7s and 10s. In fact we list as many important ones we think we need our teams to align with, and we attempt to really spend time in our 1:1s and go into deep details explaining what they mean. Because, what can ultimately be more important than culture? Below is what we've got in the most recent iteration.


  • Put customers first.
  • Celebrate differences.
  • Stay on the mission.
  • Fail fast.
  • Bring it up.
  • Distill it down.
  • Minimize assumptions.
  • Grow each other.
  • Yes and.
  • Live well.
Strategists. Creatives. Problem solvers. Let's chat!

We are excited to hear from you and share with you some of our latest projects, ideas, and technologies. As an early-stage company, our hiring process is highly customized to the applicant. In most cases, we first conduct a phone interview, follow up with a technical screening or offline assignment (depending on candidate preference), then invite you for a visit to HQ (San Jose or Shenzhen).


Our average application process, from conversation to offer, (interviews/assignments/visits) spans two weeks with a total of six hours in time. To apply, check out our current openings.


In love with Polarr, but nothing matches your skill-set? We are always looking for talent. Drop us a line, with a bit about yourself and resume and we may even dream up your digital dream job through careers@polarr.co.

Benefits and Perks

20 day PTO, 99% Medical and Dental and Vision Insurance, free lunch, gym & home internet reimbursement, etc.


Remote Working

2 day work from home, quarterly visit to headquarter for international employees. Caltrain reimbursement.


Culture & Values

Polarr makes improvements to our cultural goals each year to solve the latest challenges.


Books we're reading

We reimburse all these books and the list is expanding every month.


Polarr company blog

Read the latest insider news at Polarr.