---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff at Darwin'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-darwin-palo-alto-5q29kd3ytdsq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Member of Technical Staff at Darwin

- **Company:** Darwin
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Compensation:** $100k–$500k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-01-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/darwin/01be0d6f-9fa8-49dd-96c5-1db935fe96a8

## Job description

Advertising is an $800B industry built on interruptions. Consumer entertainment is a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem built on static media. We think media should be adaptive — able to change, personalize, and evolve for every viewer. To achieve this, Darwin is building the AI [research](https://darwin.so/research) and [products](https://ads.darwin.so) that make the layer between when media is created and when it’s experienced by a viewer fully programmable.

Today, our [AI systems](https://ads.darwin.so) are live, helping place brands into embedded AI ads inside creator content — turning objects, clothing, and environments in videos into scalable media inventory.

Darwin is backed by a16z Speedrun and leading angels in the video AI space. Our team includes engineers, creatives, and operators from Google, Synthesia, Disney, Adobe, Rumble, and other leading AI and media companies.

Apply for this role if you:

- want to work at the frontier of AI-native media systems
- believe taste and agency matter most in an AI-native world
- like turning new model capabilities into real products people actually use
- Are comfortable moving between ML models, backend systems, and product infrastructure
- Default to shipping and learning from reality rather than debating hypotheticals

## About Darwin

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Darwin builds AI systems for adaptive media, enabling native product placement in creator videos using its proprietary Atlas model.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed stage — $1M raised)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Sanjit Juneja (Founder & CEO), Justin Xiao (Head of Research), Soham Parekh (Member of Technical Staff), Dmitry Strygin (Member of Technical Staff)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Advertising technology, machine learning, generative AI, video media
- **Target customers**: B2B — brands and advertisers seeking native product placement; B2C — creators and content studios looking for automated monetization
- **Mission/purpose**: To make media adaptive — personalising content, placement, and monetization in real time for each viewer

## Products & Services
- **Atlas 1.0**: A purpose-trained vision‑language model (VLM) family that powers the entire embedded advertising pipeline — ad slot identification, adaptive ad generation, campaign recommendations, and performance simulation. Achieves 78% first‑try placement accuracy on internal benchmarks, outperforming Gemini 3 VLM and GPT‑5.2 Vision.
- **Darwin Ads**: Platform for brands to run native, AI‑powered product placements in creator videos.
- **Darwin Studio**: Tool for creators to automatically generate and manage embedded advertisments in their content.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Funding**: $1M pre‑seed round raised in October 2024 (announced March 2025)
- **Key Metric**: 4 employees (LinkedIn data; a16z Speedrun page lists 6 employees — conflicting reports) with +166.7% YoY headcount growth
- **Notable Investors**: a16z Speedrun (lead), plus top angels in the AI video space
- **Growth Signals**: Monthly web traffic of ~9,600 visits (+1,871% YoY); LinkedIn follower growth of +174.2% YoY; public release of Atlas 1.0 in March 2026

## Competitive Advantages
- End‑to‑end AI pipeline that handles scene analysis, compositing, and campaign allocation — reducing manual brand deal overhead for creators
- Atlas 1.0’s 78% first‑try accuracy (vs. 61% Gemini, 49% GPT‑5) and 14% higher ROAS through constrained optimisation
- Ability to place ads that are “native” to the video, avoiding viewer skip behaviour common with pre‑roll or overlay ads

## Strategic Focus
- Expanding the research team and scaling model training infrastructure
- Bringing adaptive media products to creators and brands (Darwin Ads, Darwin Studio)
- Developing Ad Performance Simulation for pre‑commitment forecasting and persona‑level audience breakdowns

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Early‑stage startup (4‑6 people) backed by a16z Speedrun; flat hierarchy with direct impact on product and research
- **Engineering challenges**: Cutting‑edge work in vision‑language models, video understanding, generative compositing, and constrained optimisation
- **Location**: Palo Alto, CA (likely in‑office given team size)
- **Perks**: Opportunity to shape a new category — adaptive media — from the ground up; fast‑paced, research‑focused environment

## Sources
1. [LinkedIn – Darwin](https://www.linkedin.com/company/darwinstudios)
2. [Darwin Blog – Pre-Seed Announcement](https://www.darwin.so/news/pre-seed-a16z)
3. [Darwin Blog – Introducing Atlas 1.0](https://www.darwin.so/news/atlas-1-0)
4. [a16z Speedrun – Darwin Profile](https://speedrun.a16z.com/companies/darwin)
5. [Darwin Blog – Introducing Darwin](https://www.darwin.so/news/introducing-darwin)

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