At Vellum, our mission is to be the primary platform companies use to bring AI into production. AI is the biggest technology shift since the internet – the applications of it are everywhere! We expect the world to be dramatically different in the future as foundation models get better and better. We intend to be the platform layer that brings this amazing technology to life in production use cases.

We enable companies to bring real business value from AI / LLMs. The output generated by AI / LLMs is usually stochastic and bringing AI into production requires robust testing and choosing the right model for the job. We’ve seen companies spend months of engineering time building good tooling for this (time which could be spent on their core end user facing product) yet despite this, they struggle to get the best results out of these models. Our platform provides companies best in class tooling to use their own data in production AI applications.

We’re a YC W23 company, raised $10m, and are backed by top investors like Rebel Fund, Eastlink Capital, Arash Ferdowsi (co-founder of Dropbox), Dharmesh Shah (co-founder of Hubspot), Dan Scholnick (board member of Weights & Biases, Docker, New Relic), and Divya Bhat (former YC group partner, 2x CEO). We announced our fundraise on TechCrunch here: https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/11/prompt-engineering-startup-vellum-ai/

We've been growing at 15% MoM consistently and are looking to continue that trend for the next several quarters. This is an exciting time to join early on our journey!

P.S: Why the name Vellum?

• Vellum is a type of paper - the Magna Carta was written on Vellum. We intend to be the standard source of record in production
• You can’t spell Vellum without LLM 😉

What it means to be an early engineer

Joining Vellum this early means that you’re going to play a huge part in guiding both the technical and cultural evolution of the company. Together, we’re going to face the hardest technical challenges this journey has to offer head-on. As the team grows, you’ll be the battle hardened expert that everyone looks towards for guidance.

With great power comes great responsibility 🙂

What you’re signing up for

• Tackling our most difficult (and interesting) problems - prompt chaining, fine-tuning infrastructure, and multimodality, just to name a few
• Designing, architecting, and building robust critical infrastructure
• Owning our most important backend systems
• Defining and scoping green-field projects that move the company forward
• Working closely with customers to understand what the need, figuring out how to make them successful, and owning the solutions end to end
• Serving as a cultural pillar of the team
• Navigating a fast-moving, highly competitive landscape

Our stack

In case you’re curious:

• Google Cloud Platform - as our cloud provider
• Postgres - as our primary database
• Python - what we write our backend in
• Django - for our webservers
• Flask - for our microservices
• Typescript - what we write our frontend in
• React - as our frontend framework

Working at Vellum

• We’re laser focused on helping companies bring AI into production and providing real business value. Decision making is simple: if what we do allows our users to increase how many use cases of AI they’re able to successfully put into production, then we do it!
• Don’t just cut corners. Cut the right corners (i.e. reduce scope, not quality). What can you do with 10% of your time to get 90% of the desired impact? Now that you only spent 10% of the time on this task, imagine how much more can be done with the rest of your time!
• Everyone is a 1000x engineer/designer/pm when they’re passionate about the problems they’re solving and love the people they’re working with
• Because we trust each other, we can move fast and have fun doing it 😄

Technical problems we're solving

There are so many interesting problems we need to solve: prompt chaining, fine-tuning infrastructure, open source models and multimodality, just to name a few. Ultimately, the goal is to bring engineering best practices to the fast moving world of AI/LLMs and ensure that our customers have the best models for the job trained on their own company specific data

Our stack

In case you’re curious:

• Google Cloud Platform - as our cloud provider
• Postgres - as our primary database
• Python - what we write our backend in
• Django - for our webservers
• Flask - for our microservices
• Typescript - what we write our frontend in
• React - as our frontend framework