AMA with Emily Witko, HF Recruiter
TL;DR:If you want a job at Hugging Face be sure to tell us why and what impact you would have here in your application! See the answers below for more detailsDo you need to be in the US or Europe to work for Hugging Face?Nope! We can (and do!) hire anywhere in the world. We currently have >20 countries represented.Does Huggingface/ Gradio accept applicants with no opensource contribution in Huggingface/ Gradio, but have some other experiences/contributions?Yes! One of the most important things to show when applying for jobs at Hugging Face is interest in open source projects. If you can show us your experience/contributions we don’t really care where they are. The only plus to contributing to HF/Gradio is that you’ll be familiar with offerings and can be confident in your interview/when you start working here.Doing Open Source contributions is an excellent way to stand out for technical roleseven some people from non technical teams have technical experience.How many interns are you planning on hiring?We hire in a very opportunistic way, which means that we don’t reallllllly have a minimum or maximum number of people in our plans. If you are a great candidate, we will hire you. That being said, internships can be a bit limited, only because we hate when people leave usIs there any presentation format for personal projects that is better ? (personal website with portfolio, github code, blog post, videos…) Or all at the same time ?No strong preference here! my hunch is that no matter what you decide, it should be backed up with github code, because that’s more than likely the work you would be doing!If I get rejected, can I try again in six months?Of course you can definitely apply again 6 months laterwhat is the interview process consist of?, I would suspect there is a screener a leet code like problem? or is the problem a take home?This is a great question! i was just learning about leet code problems yesterday because I get this question a lot. We do not do leet code problems BUT we do give take home assessments, and they are different for each role/team.How does the selection process take place: stages, duration, criteria?We pride ourselves on hiring much faster than big tech, as we try to be nimble in our approach. There will likely be 2-3 interviews with different members of the team and then an assessment that changes based on the project you are interested in helping with. It could be a job talk or a quick coding exercise to get a sense of your skills. The criteria changes depending on your experience and what active projects we have at the time.What qualities of a candidate are paid attention to during selection?The absolute best thing that you can do when you apply to a job at Hugging Face is let us know what unique experiences you can bring AND what project you would be excited to work on when you join. We still get tons of applications that do not include any write up as to how you can help us democratize machine learning, which more than often means we’re going to skip your application. Even just three sentences on how YOU specifically can help us make an impact goes a long way.Also, like we keep saying, any open source contributions are extremely helpfulIf you just re-implement existing things it will get less visibility. Usually contributing to existing tools or creating tools that solve people needs will be more visible. For example, many popular repos have good-first-issue issues to which you can contribute.What are the most common mistakes encountered when selecting a candidate?I kinda of alluded to this in my last answer, but not telling us why you are awesome when you apply is a huge mistake. Applying to jobs is a great opportunity to tell us so much about why you are great and deserve to be here, so don’t be shy! Also, I should mention that joining groups like this is a great way to learn more about a company and network your way into a position. Just being involved in these types of conversations goes a long way.Not sharing what’s their interest, adding link to GitHub or even a resume. I’ve seen applications with very little info. I think it’s important to be very concise but informative at the same time. We get 100s of applications per role, so it’s important to make it easier for people going through them.Describe your ideal candidateThis one is too tough to answer specifically because it so very much depends on the role that you are applying to. Generally though, our ideal candidate is autonomous and a self-starter, already has experience contributing to open source projects, and wants to build amazing and responsible AI.Is it possible to continue working in the company after completing an internship?YES! This is 100% what we are hoping for when we hire interns. We always want our relationships to continue and turn into full time roles.How about people who have done many deep learning course and has built many deep learning projects in Computer Vision, UNet project, NLP, and ASR projects in Pytorch?  Are there any opportunities for people like them at Hugging Face? What if they have BS degree too?YES! Zach Mueller is a great exampleFor an internship, are you looking for a ready-made specialist with a good theoretical and practical base or a person who knows how to study and has good soft skills for teamwork and self-study with pet projects?Honestly, for this question, I would say that some hard skills are a must have. We work fairly independently here at Hugging Face, so you need to be able to start and complete projects on your own. Having a strong opinion is a great place to start.The name and description of this vacancy is very abstract and the tasks that the candidate will solve during the passage of this internship are not entirely clear.This is feedback that we get quite a bit about our job descriptions and it’s something that I’d like to improve upon. The reason the roles are somewhat vague is because we work on lots and lots of projects all at once and our favorite people to hire are the ones that apply with a description of a problem that they want to solve themselves.Hugging Face is a startup so the work life balance must be very bad, right?i LOVE this question. We work hard and we also fully respect everyone’s life boundaries. Something that I love about the fact that we have folks all over the world means that you actually don’t need to work the same hours every day, which essentially means that my days can be super flexible.