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

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.