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Scale API (YC S16) | ML & Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-time | $100,000-$120,000 + Equity 0.25%-1.5%

Scale API is looking for software engineers and machine learning engineers to join our team of 10. Scale API is an API for human intelligence. Our mission is to bring human intelligence to software applications. By combining machine learning and a human workforce, we're actively bridging the gap between what software can do and what humans can do. Our current clients include Alphabet (Google), Uber, Procter & Gamble, Houzz, and many more.

Why you should join:

- We're working on a core problem for our decade - bringing human intelligence to software

- We are growing exceptionally quickly and have amazing investors. We are an extremely promising startup for our size.

- We're a talented team with experience from Dropbox, Quora, Snapchat, Facebook, Palantir, MIT, Harvard, and CMU.

Email careers@scaleapi.com with your GitHub and LinkedIn profiles

Scale API (YC S16) | ML & Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-time | $100,000-$120,000 + Equity 0.25%-1.5%

Scale API is looking for software engineers and machine learning engineers to join our team of 10. Scale API is an API for human intelligence. Our mission is to bring human intelligence to software applications. By combining machine learning and a human workforce, we're actively bridging the gap between what software can do and what humans can do. Our current clients include Alphabet (Google), Uber, Procter & Gamble, Houzz, and many more.

Why you should join:

- We're working on a core problem for our decade - bringing human intelligence to software

- We are growing exceptionally quickly and have amazing investors. We are an extremely promising startup for our size.

- We're a talented team with experience from Dropbox, Quora, Snapchat, Facebook, Palantir, MIT, Harvard, and CMU.

Email careers@scaleapi.com with your GitHub and LinkedIn profiles

Thank you Stepan :) Means a lot

Got this hack from elsewhere on HN. Try this link:

http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/sca...

and just click to follow the link. If the referrer is facebook, they let you through.

We're approaching the problem differently than both of those companies, and over time I think the difference will be more and more apparent.

Scale is vertically focused, currently focusing on image annotations and audio transcription. This allows us to provide extremely high accuracy and an ever-improving developer experience by investing heavily in tooling, automation, and screening. It's very difficult to do that as a more generic crowdsourcing service.

We're also entirely developer-focused as a company. Our users are engineers, and we have a singular focus to provide the best experience in using Scale to build more complex products.

Right now we're very focused on image, audio, and video applications. In the near future, it will include transcription, captions, object detection, and feature detection. We plan on adding features around NLP and language applications as well, since that's an area with a ton of interesting work.

In general, we hope to tackle anything that humans are better than machines at and would make sense as APIs.

Thanks Travis, appreciate it!

Thanks Jon! :)

I'm Alex, CEO of Scale. We definitely hope to solve many of the same problems as MTurk, and think it's a brilliant idea.

Our main focuses for our product are around high quality, ease-of-use, and reliability. In our experience, MTurk exhibits none of those.

It requires a lot of work to get truly high quality results, and virtually impossible above a certain quality threshold. MTurk promises no SLAs and forces the customer to do a lot of work such as price discovery, building UIs, and quality control, not to mention how difficult to use their API is. Our philosophy is handle all of that complexity for the developer.

We've been inspired by our own experiences using easy-to-use APIs like Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, etc., and wanted to build a similar experience for human intelligence. Hope that helps!

Scale API (YC S16) | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-time | $100,000-$120,000 + Equity 0.25%-1.5%

Scale API (YC S16) is looking for software engineers and machine learning engineers to join our team of 6. Scale API is an API for human intelligence. Our mission is to bring human intelligence to software applications. By combining machine learning and a human workforce, we're actively bridging the gap between what software can do and what humans can do. Our current clients include Alphabet (Google), Uber, Procter & Gamble, Houzz, and many more.

Why you should join:

- We're working on a core problem for our decade - bringing human intelligence to software

- We are growing exceptionally quickly and have amazing investors. We are an extremely promising startup for our size.

- We're a talented team with experience from Dropbox, Quora, Snapchat, Facebook, Palantir, MIT, and CMU.

Email careers@scaleapi.com with your GitHub and LinkedIn profiles

Scale API (YC S16) | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-time | $80,000-$120,000 + Equity 0.25%-1.5%

Scale API (YC S16) is looking for software engineers and machine learning engineers to join our team of 6. Scale API is an API for human intelligence. Our mission is to bring human intelligence to software applications. By combining machine learning and a human workforce, we're actively bridging the gap between what software can do and what humans can do. Our current clients include Alphabet (Google), Uber, Procter & Gamble, Houzz, and many more.

Why you should join:

- We're working on a core problem for our decade - bringing human intelligence to software - We have great traction and revenue and are growing quickly - We're a talented team with experience from Dropbox, Quora, Snapchat, Facebook, Palantir, MIT, and CMU.

Email careers@scaleapi.com with your GitHub and LinkedIn profiles

Wow that's really cool!

We're working on a lot of the same things at Scale API (www.scaleapi.com). Starting with a higher quality set of task-completers, and building in similar statistical guarantees for our tasks.

One of the things we work on is building quality for responses that are little more complex (bounding boxes and audio transcription, for example). I'd be interested to see if we can apply some of your learnings to those task types!

Definitely. That's one of our focuses at Scale API (www.scaleapi.com). We build the UIs and the tooling to make sure they're efficient and intuitive, to avoid the exact problems of requesters making poorly designed work.

We're working on redesigning and cleaning up all of our pages! Sorry about that

Cool! We're working on a redesign of the pricing page—stay tuned :)

Sorry to hear about that experience. You should consider using Scale API (www.scaleapi.com). This is a perfect use case for our data collection API: https://docs.scaleapi.com/#create-data-collection-task

Hey guys! I'm cofounder of Scale API (www.scaleapi.com), a YC S16 company building an API for human intelligence. We've been working to obviate the need to tune your system to work on products like MTurk, and instead have a really simple API that just works. We've worked to build technology to guarantee quality to our customers and build a simple developer experience.

I really respect your ability to work with MTurk and have it work for you guys. In our experience, it often takes significant effort to get anything remotely functional and reliable on MTurk. That's why we're building Scale :)

Scale API (YC S16) | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-time | $80,000-$120,000 + Equity 0.25%-1.5%

Scale API (YC S16) is looking for software engineers and machine learning engineers to join our small team of 3. Scale API is an API for human intelligence. Our mission is to bring human intelligence to software applications. By combining machine learning and a human workforce, we're actively bridging the gap between what software can do and what humans can do. Our current clients include Alphabet (Google), Uber, Procter & Gamble, Houzz, and many more.

Why you should join:

- We're working on a core problem for our decade - bringing human intelligence to software - We have great traction and revenue and are growing quickly - We're a talented team with experience from Quora, Snapchat, Facebook, Palantir, MIT, and CMU.

Email careers@scaleapi.com with your GitHub and LinkedIn profiles

Thanks for the write up Gordon! We really appreciate it here at Scale :)

Hey there—I'm CEO and cofounder of Scale API (YC S16, https://scaleapi.com), which is a developer-first API for human tasks. We allow customers outside the US, and are much more focused on quality than MTurk.

Definitely give us a shot, and feel free to email me if you have any questions! alex@scaleapi.com

Thanks! We try to have cool demos :) We're working on having faster and faster guarantees, but for now we'll guarantee responses within 20 minutes. It's definitely much faster normally.

By default, Scale is built using webhooks/callbacks to return responses. We definitely don't want our API to be blocking, and so we designed it intentionally not to block.

Applications of human-in-the-loop systems like this are exactly why we built Scale API (www.scaleapi.com, YC S16).

Unfortunately, Mechanical Turk is often a bad choice these days for these types of applications—it's extremely difficult to guarantee quality, not to mention hard to use. Using employees also works well to a point (we did some of this at companies I've worked at too), but it doesn't scale, and should be done sparingly.

Great application of humans in the loop—this is the type of thing that really excites me. We're trending towards more and more human-augmented software, and it opens up so many possibilities for what software can do!

For one, as a company, we're fully focused on our API (whereas Fancy Hands is primarily focused on the consumer assistant product). That means they're less willing and agile to help developers, learn about their use cases, or support them as they scale.

Another large differentiator is FancyHands has often been too expensive to scale with companies as they grow, and aren't focused on building the tooling necessary to make large-scale operations possible.

Not yet ;)

Thanks Anand! We truly appreciate all your support and advice :)

Thanks!

For now, there are a couple main differences: * High quality team members we personally vet (vs. the crowdsource model) * Significantly simpler API * We build all the tooling for our team members ensuring they complete things efficiently. * Realtime responses, even for low volume

Human error is an issue that we're always tackling. First, we're hiring a really high quality team so we're minimizing error from the start. Beyond that, we have a review system in place for the human responses, to ensure that the results are accurate.

This is something that we're always looking to improve and are always building tooling to solve.

Hey everyone! I'm Alex, co-founder at Scale. Our goal with Scale is to empower the next generation of human-driven products.

If you have any uses cases in your company or just as a developer, please email me at alex@scaleapi.com and I'm happy to chat.

I'm also here to answer any questions you have :)

That seems feasible as long as you give very explicit instructions to the person performing the task. I'm not sure if I could do that without instructions!

One of our goals is to be able to provide flat, predictable pricing to developers so it's extremely easy for them to integrate.

For now, the $.50 flat pricing has been working well, because most phone calls are pretty limited in length/scope. If we notice a larger variance in the time of our phone calls, though, we might slightly change the pricing scheme.