About Us

Shorthand exists to empower creative teams to produce and publish beautiful, transformative content radically faster. We’ve begun our journey by creating an easy-to-use platform for one of the most creatively and technically demanding use cases on the web — immersive feature stories — and we’re proud to count many of the world’s best known and most discerning publishers, brands, not-for-profits, and universities as loyal customers. With customers on every continent (except Antarctica!), there’s never been a more exciting time to join Shorthand. Our company has the rare distinction in this era of money-burning startups of being both investor-backed and comfortably profitable. We're a small team of geeks with art and heart and a high bar for quality.

To deliver our magic to customers and their audiences, we build software that is scalable, flexible, reliable and as simple as possible.

The Role

Shorthand is offering a 3-month paid intern position focusing on exploring innovative applications of computer vision and machine learning technology to immersive storytelling. This position is flexible with dates but expected to occur during the uni holidays.

Project 1: Improved Matting for 3D reconstruction

One of the more challenging problems in 3D scene reconstruction is matting - that is, separating out foreground and background layers when parts of the foreground (such as hair) are translucent, and there has been significant academic work in recent years in automatically performing image mapping, including ML-based approaches een devised in recent years. For this project we would like to evaluate the current state of the art in automatic matting techniques for generality, effectiveness, and suitability to 3D reconstruction, and ultimately implement one of these techniques within our 3D system.

This project is available to students in their 3rd or 4th year, completing a degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent,

We are looking for someone who:

*Is whip-smart and a fast learner, as demonstrated by career achievements and code school or university results.

*Has strong software development skills in Python or C++

*Has great communication skills in English, particularly with respect to writing.

*Has experience or interest in working in a remote small business or startup environment.

*Preferably has experience with 3D graphics and/or machine learning.

Core Responsibilities:

*Develop prototype implementations using computer vision technologies.

*Evaluate technologies and implementations with respect to immersive storytelling.

*Report on your findings.

Personality Attributes:

*You are a proactive self-starter who does not need to be told what to do and will be resourceful to find solutions to any challenge.

*You thrive in a fast-paced and demanding environment and possess a high level of intellectual curiosity.

*You are collaborative.

*You find fulfillment in the job itself and happiness in a job well done.

Application Process

We value direct communication here at Shorthand and want to be transparent on how we hire. Our process for interns involves:

*An initial Zoom screen: You’ll have an initial Zoom meeting with the project supervisor to discuss your background, the role, what led you to apply, and assess your technical chops.

*Interview: You’ll have a second interview over Zoom with another of our team members who you would likely be working with day-to-day.

*Final checks: The successful candidate will undergo a reference and criminal background check prior to us sending the final employment agreement.

*Our workplace is 100% distributed and all interviews are conducted virtually unless otherwise advised. Please let us know of any reasonable accommodations you may need during the interview process.