Applications Engineer (Python/ML) at Hugging Face

At Hugging Face, we're on a journey to democratize good AI. We are building the fastest-growing platform for AI builders with over 11 million users who collectively shared over 4 million models, 1 million datasets, and 1.5 million Gradio apps. Our open-source libraries have more than 700,000 stars on GitHub.

About the Role

Roles at Hugging Face are very fluid and dynamic—we are looking for someone comfortable taking on different challenges that will evolve over time.

You'll join the Applications team, whose goal is to build the tooling that helps developers create machine learning applications on top of the primitives we offer on the Hub: Gradio, Spaces, Inference Providers, Datasets, Xet, and more. Concretely, this means maintaining and growing libraries like Trackio, a local-first, agent-friendly experiment tracking platform, FastRTC, our library for real-time audio and video streaming in Python, and Gradio itself, used by more than 1 million developers each month. These tools have made machine learning accessible to a wide audience—anyone with an internet connection can now use cutting-edge models right from their browser.

Several of these libraries are still early in their lifecycle, and new ones will start from scratch. A large part of this role is taking a project from its first users to widespread adoption: shaping the API, shipping fast, and getting it into developers' hands.

Key responsibilities include:

• Designing, developing, and maintaining core features across the team's libraries, ensuring scalability, reliability, and ease of use for ML developers.
• Architecting complex Python projects and frameworks that serve as foundational tools for the ML community.
• Growing early-stage libraries: defining the API surface, writing the demos and documentation that make them click, and driving adoption in the developer community.
• Working on real-time streaming and networking capabilities, a core priority for Gradio 7 and beyond.
• Collaborating with open-source contributors and engaging with the broader community through code reviews, discussions, and support.
• Integrating modern frontend technologies to create seamless and intuitive user experiences for Python-based web applications.
• Adapting to evolving engineering challenges and contributing to the direction of our developer tools as the landscape changes.

Requirements

About You

If you love open-source, are passionate about making machine learning more accessible, have experience building Python frameworks, and want to contribute to some of the fastest-growing libraries in the ML ecosystem, then we can't wait to see your application!

What you'll need:

• A Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Computer Science or a related field
• 5+ years of professional Python development experience
• Experience architecting complex Python projects or frameworks
• A track record of taking early-stage libraries or products from first users to broad adoption
• Professional experience with JavaScript or TypeScript
• Professional experience with a modern frontend framework such as React or Svelte
• Experience core-contributing to or maintaining open-source software projects

Nice to have:

• Experience with real-time audio/video streaming or networking (WebRTC, WebSockets)
• Contributions to libraries such as pipecat, LiveKit, FastAPI, or Starlette