My initial reaction to the ad, upon watching it in the launch event was "huh, that's a fun reference to the Hydraulic Press Channel". The slapstick elements (trumpet noise, squishy balls) made it come across as light-hearted, rather than an ominous display of force by a large company crushing artists' tools.
This idea of 'squashing all these tools down to a thin slab of glass' made sense given their somewhat unusual focus on the thinness of the device. It was a bit of a throwback to the early 2010s smartphone innovation, where the size of the devices was the yardstick by which manufacturers would outdo each other. I would charitably interpret it as an uninspired marketing team trying to spin some version of Jobs' classic "the iPhone is simultaneously an iPod, phone and internet device" - however the party trick is old, and nobody's impressed anymore.
Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.
We're building coding agent systems for large-scale industrial projects, and an agentic cloud.
Why join:
- Small, senior team: ex-DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, Amazon, and Cambridge University, multiple PhDs
- Hard problems across distributed systems, OS/sandboxing, ML and LLM inference/post‑training. Real users; ship to prod.
- Big Tech salary + options.
Open roles (all Senior/Staff; hands-on):
- Full-Stack - design and build new coding agent experiences, working with a top designer
- Agent Infrastructure - branching sandboxes, filesystems, orchestration, observability
- Backend / Eng Lead - build cloud from first principles; distribution, sync, load-balancing, events
- LLM inference & post-training - long context tech, RLVR, vLLM, performance
- Devrel & GTM – live-developing, tutorials, OSS/community, hackathons - drive adoption
You might be a fit if:
- 5+ years building and operating production systems (or exceptional evidence).
- Own 0→1 projects; comfortable reading & generating lots of code.
- Public work (OSS/papers/blogs/products) or strong portfolio.
Do apply! https://www.igent.ai/join-us