Vancouver

Who we are Established in 2017, Wayve is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, driven by breakthroughs in Embodied AI. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic technologies empower vehicles to navigate complex environments effortlessly.

Supported by prominent investors, Wayve is advancing the transition from assisted to fully automated driving, making transportation safer, more efficient, and universally accessible. Join our world-class, multinational team of engineers and researchers as we push the boundaries of frontier AI and autonomous driving, creating impactful technologies and products on a global scale

Where you will have an impact We are seeking an experienced researcher to be a founding member of our Vancouver team! We are prioritising someone with experience actively participating in AI projects applied to autonomous driving or similar robotics or decision-making domains, inclusive, but not limited to the following specific areas:

Foundation models for robotics or embodied AI Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning Offline reinforcement learning Large language models Planning with learned models, model predictive control and tree search Imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning and causal inference Learned agent models: behavioural and physical models of cars, people, and other dynamic agents Challenges you will own You'll be working on some of the world's hardest problems, and able to attack them in new ways. You'll be a key member of our diverse, cross-disciplinary team, helping teach our robots how to drive safely and comfortably in complex real-world environments. This encompasses many aspects of research across perception, prediction, planning, and control, including:

How to leverage our large, rich, and diverse sources of real-world driving data How to architect our models to best employ the latest advances in foundation models, transformers, world models, etc, evaluating and incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into our workflows. Which learning algorithms to use (e.g. reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning) How to leverage simulation for controlled experimental insight, training data augmentation, and re-simulation How to scale models efficiently across data, model size, and compute, while maintaining efficient deployment on the car Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate research findings into scalable, production-level solutions. You also have the potential to contribute to academic publications for top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, CVPR, ICRA, ICLR, CoRL etc. working in a world-class team, contributing to the scientific community and establishing Wayve as a leader in the field.

What you will bring to Wayve Proven track record of research in one or more of the topics above demonstrated through deployed applications or publications. Strong programming skills in Python, with experience in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, numpy, pandas, etc. Experience bringing a machine learning research concept through the full ML development cycle Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently as well as in a team environment. Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced, innovative, interdisciplinary team environment. Desirable: Experience bringing an ML research concept through to production and at scale PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field

What we offer you The chance to be part of a truly mission driven organisation and an opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving. Unlike our competitors, Wayve is still relatively small and nimble, giving you the chance to make a huge impact Competitive compensation and benefits A dynamic and fast-paced work environment in which you will grow every day - learning on the job, from the brightest minds in our space, and with support for more formal learning opportunities too

The Perception team at Zoox is responsible for developing the eyes and ears of our self driving car. Navigating safely and competently in the world requires us to detect, classify, track and understand several different attributes of all the objects around us that we might interact with, all in real time and with very high precision.

As a member of the Perception team at Zoox, you will be responsible for developing and improving state of the art machine learning techniques for doing everything from 2D/3D object detection, panoptic segmentation, tracking, to attribute classification. You will be working not just with our team of talented engineers and researchers in perception, but cross functionally with several teams including sensors, prediction and planning, and you will have access to the best sensor data in the world and an incredible infrastructure for testing and validating your algorithms.

Location Mountain View, CA

Description Gatik is thrilled to be at CVPR! Come meet our team at booth 1831 to talk about how you could make an impact at the autonomous middle mile logistics company redefining the transportation landscape.

Who we are: Gatik, the leader in autonomous middle mile logistics, delivers goods safely and efficiently using its fleet of light & medium-duty trucks. The company focuses on short-haul, B2B logistics for Fortune 500 customers including Kroger, Walmart, Tyson Foods, Loblaw, Pitney Bowes, Georgia-Pacific, and KBX; enabling them to optimize their hub-and-spoke supply chain operations, enhance service levels and product flow across multiple locations while reducing labor costs and meeting an unprecedented expectation for faster deliveries. Gatik’s Class 3-7 autonomous box trucks are commercially deployed in multiple markets including Texas, Arkansas, and Ontario, Canada.

About the role: We are seeking passionate Senior/Staff Software Engineers, who have strong fundamentals in software development practices and are experts in C++ language in production-oriented environment. The ideal candidate is a highly experienced C++ developer with a passion for enabling the world's first safe, reliable & efficient network of autonomous vehicles. You will partner with the research and software engineers to design, develop, test and validate AV features for our autonomous fleet.

This role will be onsite at our Mountain View office.

What you'll do: +Design, implement, integrate, and support real-time mission-critical software for the Gatik’s autonomy stack +Work with the research engineers to develop maintainable, testable and robust software designs +Architect and implement solutions to complex issues between components partitioned across the large software stack +Be at the forefront of guiding & ensuring best SDLC practices while contributing to improving the safety in the core autonomy stack +Collaborate with the Infrastructure and DevOps teams for efficient, secure and scalable software delivery to a network of Gatik’s autonomous fleet
+Guide and mentor autonomy researchers and algorithm developers to make sure their components are running efficiently and with optimal compute and memory usage +Review and refine technical requirements and translate them into high-level design & plans to support the development of safe AV technology +Conduct code and design reviews and advise on technical matters

Click the apply button below to see the full job description and apply

Location San Francisco, CA

Description Amazon Music is an immersive audio entertainment service that deepens connections between fans, artists, and creators. From personalized music playlists to exclusive podcasts, concert livestreams to artist merch, Amazon Music is innovating at some of the most exciting intersections of music and culture. We offer experiences that serve all listeners with our different tiers of service: Prime members get access to all the music in shuffle mode, and top ad-free podcasts, included with their membership; customers can upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited for unlimited, on-demand access to 100 million songs, including millions in HD, Ultra HD, and spatial audio; and anyone can listen for free by downloading the Amazon Music app or via Alexa-enabled devices. Join us for the opportunity to influence how Amazon Music engages fans, artists, and creators on a global scale.

You will be managing a team within the Music Machine Learning and Personalization organization that is responsible for developing, training, serving and iterating on models used for personalized candidate generation for both Music and Podcasts.

Seattle, WA or Costa Mesa, CA

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. By bringing the expertise, technology, and business model of the 21st century’s most innovative companies to the defense industry, Anduril is changing how military systems are designed, built and sold. Anduril’s family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered operating system that turns thousands of data streams into a realtime, 3D command and control center. As the world enters an era of strategic competition, Anduril is committed to bringing cutting-edge autonomy, AI, computer vision, sensor fusion, and networking technology to the military in months, not years.

The Vehicle Autonomy (Robotics) team at Anduril develops aerial and ground-based robotic systems. The team is responsible for taking products like Ghost, Anvil, and our Sentry Tower from paper sketches to operational systems. We work in close coordination with specialist teams like Perception, Autonomy, and Manufacturing to solve some of the hardest problems facing our customers. We are looking for software engineers and roboticists excited about creating a powerful robotics stack that includes computer vision, motion planning, SLAM, controls, estimation, and secure communications.

WHAT YOU'LL DO -Write and maintain core libraries (frame transformations, targeting and guidance, etc.) that all robotics platforms at Anduril will use -Own feature development and rollout for our products - recent examples include: building a Software-in-the-Loop simulator for our Tower product, writing an autofocus control system for cameras, creating a distributed over IPC coordinate frame library, redesigning the Pan-Tilt controls to accurately move heavy loads -Design, evaluate, and implement sensor integrations that support operation by both human and autonomous planning agents -Work closely with our hardware and manufacturing teams during product development, providing quick feedback that contributes to the final hardware design

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS -Strong engineering background from industry or school, ideally in areas/fields such as Robotics, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mechatronics, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or Physics -5+ years of C++ or Rust experience in a Linux development environment -Experience building software solutions involving significant amounts of data processing and analysis -Ability to quickly understand and navigate complex systems and established code bases -Must be eligible to obtain and hold a US DoD Security Clearance.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS -Experience in one or more of the following: motion planning, perception, localization, mapping, controls, and related system performance metrics. -Understanding of systems software (kernel, device drivers, system calls) and performance analysis

Captions is the AI-powered creative studio. Millions of creators around the world have used Captions to make their video content stand out from the pack and we're on a mission to empower the next billion.

Based in NYC, we are a team of ambitious, experienced, and devoted engineers, designers, and marketers. You'll be joining an early team where you'll have an outsized impact on both the product and company's culture.

We’re very fortunate to have some the best investors and entrepreneurs backing us, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Antoine Martin, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, SVAngel, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, Chapter One, Lenny Rachitsky, and more.

Check out our latest milestone and our recent feature on the TODAY show and the New York Times.

** Please note that all of our roles will require you to be in-person at our NYC HQ (located in Union Square) **

Responsibilities:

Conduct research and develop models to advance the state-of-the-art in generative computer vision technologies, with a focus on creating highly realistic digital faces, bodies, avatars.

Strive to set new standards in the realism of 3D digital human appearance, movement, and personality, ensuring that generated content closely resembles real-life scenarios.

Implement techniques to achieve high-quality results in zero-shot or few-shot settings, as well as customized avatars for different use cases while maintaining speed and accuracy.

Develop innovative solutions to enable comprehensive customization of video content, including the creation of digital people, modifying scenes, and manipulating actions and speech within videos.

Preferred Qualifications:

PhD in computer science (or related field) and/ or 5+ years of industry experience.

Strong academic background with a focus on computer vision and transformers, specializing in NeRFs, Gaussian Splatting, Diffusion, GANs or related areas.

Publication Record: Highly relevant publication history, with a focus on generating or manipulating realistic digital faces, bodies, expressions, body movements, etc. Ideal candidates will have served as the primary author on these publications.

Expertise in Deep Learning: Proficiency in deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar, with hands-on experience in designing, training, and deploying neural networks for multimodal tasks.

Strong understanding of Computer Science fundamentals (algorithms and data structures).

Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans

Anything you need to do your best work

We’ve done team off-sites to places like Paris, London, Park City, Los Angeles, Upstate NY, and Nashville with more planned in the future.

Captions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Please note benefits apply to full time employees only.

Natick, MA, United States

The Company: Cognex is a global leader in the exciting and growing field of machine vision. This position is a hybrid role in our Natick, MA corporate HQ.

The Team: This position is for an experienced Software Engineer in the Core Vision Technology team at Cognex, focused on architecting and productizing the best-in-class computer vision algorithms and AI models that power Cognex’s industrial barcode readers and 2D vision tools with a mission to innovate on behalf of customers and make this technology accessible to a broad range of users and platforms. Our products combine custom hardware, specialized lighting and optics, and world-class vision algorithms/models to create embedded systems that can find and read high-density symbols on package labels or marked directly on a variety of industrial parts, including aircraft engines, electronics substrates, and pharmaceutical test equipment. Our devices need to read hundreds of codes per second, so speed-optimized hardware and software work together to create best in class technology. Companies around the world rely on Cognex vision tools and technology to guide assembly, automate inspection, and speed up production and distribution.

Job Summary: The Core Vision Technology team is seeking an experienced developer with deep knowledge of the software development life cycle, creative problem solving skills and solid design thinking, with a focus on productization of AI technology on embedded platforms. You will play the critical role of ** a chief architect **, who will lead the development and productization of computer vision AI models and algorithms on multiple Cognex products; with the goal of making the technology modular and available to a broad range of users and platforms. In this role, you will interface with machine vision experts in R&D, product, hardware, and other software engineering teams at Cognex. A successful individual will lead design discussions, make sound architectural choices for the future on different embedded platforms, advocate for engineering excellence, mentor junior engineers and extend technical influence across teams. Prior experience with productization of AI technology is essential for this position.

Essential Functions: -Develop and productize innovative vision algorithms, including AI models developed by the R&D team for detecting and reading challenging 1D and 2D barcodes, and vision tools for gauging, inspection, guiding, and identifying industrial parts. -Lead software and API design discussions and make scalable technology choices meeting current and future business needs.
-More details in the link below

Minimum education and work experience required: MS or PhD from a top engineering school in EE, CS or equivalent 7+ years relevant, high tech work experience

If you would like to meet the hiring manager at CVPR to discuss this opportunity, please email ahmed.elbarkouky@cognex.com

Excited to see you at CVPR! We’ll be at booth 1404. Come see us to talk more about roles.

Our team consists of people with diverse software and academic experiences. We work together towards one common goal: integrating the software, you'll help us build into hundreds of millions of vehicles.

As a Research Engineer for Optimization, you will focus on research and development related to the optimization of ML models on GPU’s or AI accelerators. You will use your judgment in complex scenarios and apply optimization techniques to a wide variety of technical problems. Specifically, you will:

• Research, prototype and evaluate state of the art model optimization techniques and algorithms
• Characterize neural network quality and performance based on research, experiment and performance data and profiling
• Incorporate optimizations and model development best practices into existing ML development lifecycle and workflow.
• Define the technical vision and roadmap for DL model optimizations
• Write technical reports indicating qualitative and quantitative results to colleagues and customers
• Develop, deploy and optimize deep learning (DL) models on various GPU and AI accelerator chipsets/platforms

You will join a team of 40+ Researchers and Engineers within the R&D Department working on cutting edge challenges in the Generative AI space, with a focus on creating highly realistic, emotional and life-like Synthetic humans through text-to-video. Within the team you’ll have the opportunity to work with different research teams and squads across multiple areas led by our Director of Science, Prof. Vittorio Ferrari, and directly impact our solutions that are used worldwide by over 55,000 businesses.

If you have seen the full ML lifecycle from ideation through implementation, testing and release, and you have a passion for large data, large model training and building solutions with clean code, this is your chance. This is an opportunity to work for a company that is impacting businesses at a rapid pace across the globe.

Redmond, Washington, United States

Overview The Microsoft Research AI Frontiers group in Redmond is looking for a Senior Research Software Engineer to build state-of-the-art tools for evaluating and understanding foundation models, with a focus of real-world uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our team conducts influential research published at top-tier venues in AI and ML (including NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, and FAccT) and works within Microsoft’s Responsible AI ecosystem to impact our AI-driven technologies such as Azure, Office, and Bing.

We are seeking candidates with demonstrated ability for technical work in the space of large foundational models with proficient coding and machine learning skills. The preferred candidate is:

Passionate about rigorous evaluation, understanding, and development of foundational models.
Motivated to make successful research methods accessible to the AI community through prototypes, open-source libraries, and development tools. Proficient in design thinking and Object Oriented Design (OOD), building clean, modular, maintainable and user-friendly open-source ML Experienced in measuring and maximizing the impact of open-source libraries.

As a Senior Research Software Engineer, you will play a crucial role in designing and developing impactful, high quality and well-engineered frameworks to empower the scientific evaluation, understanding, and development of foundational models. You will work closely with a team of passionate researchers and engineers to make sure such frameworks are compatible with modern cloud platforms, Machine Learning (ML) frameworks and libraries, model architectures, and various data modalities. You will also play a central role in defining and running large-scale experiments that contribute to our team’s research.

We are looking for a team player interested in developing next-generation platforms and tools for Machine Learning (ML) as well as conducting state-of-the-art research. Topics of interest include but are not limited to rigorous evaluation and benchmarking, advances in AI interpretability, bias and fairness, and safety in real-world deployments. Our group takes a holistic approach to studying foundational models that includes a variety of data modalities (language, vision, multi-modal, and structured data) and modern model architectures. Candidates should demonstrate expertise in many of these aspects or show that they are interested in generalizing their skills into a variety of modalities and architectures.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we’re dedicated to this mission across every aspect of our company. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. Join us and help shape the future of the world.

Responsibilities Collaborate with a dedicated research and engineering team to design and develop ML frameworks for model evaluation and understanding.

• Define benchmarks and execute experiments for rigorous model evaluation and understanding.

• System Design and Object-Oriented Design: Envision elegant solutions and craft scalable and efficient systems to drive the success of our Machile Learning (ML) frameworks. Develop clean, modular, and maintainable code to shape the foundation of our evaluation framework.

• Work closely with partner engineering teams in both research and production.

• Mentor or onboard incoming engineering contributors and empower them to maximize the team’s impact.

We are seeking a highly motivated candidate for a fully funded postdoctoral researcher position to work in 3D computer graphics and 3D computer vision.

The successful candidate will join the 3D Graphics and Vision research group led by Prof. Binh-Son Hua at the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland to work on topics related to generative AI in the 3D domain. The School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin is a collegiate, friendly, and research-intensive centre for academic study and research excellence. The School has been ranked #1 in Ireland, top 25 in Europe, and top 100 Worldwide (QS Subject Rankings 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021).

The postdoctoral researcher is expected to conduct fundamental research and publish in top-tier computer vision and computer graphics conferences (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, SIGGRAPH) and journals (TPAMI, IJCV). Other responsibilities include supporting graduate or undergraduate students with technical guidance and engagement in other research activities such as paper reviews, reading group, workshop organization, etc.

The start date of the position is August 01, 2024. Contract duration is 1 year with the option of renewing for a second year. The successful candidate will require the following skills and knowledge: • PhD in Computer Science or related fields; • Strong tracked records in 3D computer graphics, 3D computer vision; • Hands-on experience in training deep models and generative models is required; • Hands-on experience and relevant skills in computer graphics and computer vision application development such as OpenGL, OpenCV, CUDA, Blender is desirable; • Strong programming skills in C++, Python. Capability in implementing systems from research papers and open-source software. • Additional background in math, statistics, or physics is an advantage.

Applicants should provide the following information: • A comprehensive CV including a full list of publications; • The name and contact details of two referees. One of the referees should be the applicant’s PhD supervisor; • Two representative papers by the applicant. Interested candidates should email their applications to Binh-Son Hua (https://sonhua.github.io) directly. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position has been filled.

Redmond, Washington, United States

Overview We are seeking a highly skilled and passionate Research Scientist to join our Responsible & OpenAI Research (ROAR) team in Azure Cognitive Services.

As a Research Scientist, you will play a key role in advancing the field of Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ensure safe releases of the rapidly advancing AI technologies, such as GPT-4, GPT-4V, DALL-E 3 and beyond, as well as to expand and enhance our standalone Azure AI Content Safety Service.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities Conduct cutting-edge research to develop Responsible AI definitions, methodologies, algorithms, and models for both measurement and mitigation of AI risks. Stay abreast of the latest advancements in the field and contribute to the scientific community through publications at top venues. Contribute to the development of Responsible AI policies, guidelines, and best practices and ensure the practical implementation of these guidelines within various AI technology stacks across Microsoft, promoting a consistent approach to Responsible AI. Enable the safe release of new Azure OpenAI Service features, expand and enhance the Azure AI Content Safety Service with new detection technologies. Develop innovative approaches to address AI safety challenges for diverse customer scenarios. Other: Embody our Culture and Values

Location Palo Alto, CA

Description Amazon is looking for talented Postdoctoral Scientists to join our Stores Foundational AI team for a one-year, full-time research position.

The Stores Foundational AI team builds foundation models for multiple Amazon entities, such as ASIN, customer, seller and brand. These foundation models are used in downstream applications by various partner teams in Stores. Our team also invest in building foundation model for image generation, optimized for product image generation. We leverage the latest development to create our solutions and innovate to push state of the art.

The Postdoc is expected to conduct research and build state-of-the-art algorithms in video understanding and representation learning in the era of LLMs. Specifically, Designing efficient algorithms to learn accurate representations for videos. Building extensive video understanding capabilities including various content classification tasks. Designing algorithms that can generate high-quality videos from set of product images. Improve the quality of our foundation models along the following dimensions: robustness, interpretability, fairness, sustainability, and privacy.

The Autonomy Software Metrics team is responsible for providing engineers and leadership at Zoox with tools to evaluate the behavior of Zoox’s autonomy stack using simulation. The team collaborates with experts across the organization to ensure a high safety bar, great customer experience, and rapid feedback to developers. The metrics team is responsible for evaluating the complete end-to-end customer experience through simulation, evaluating factors that impact safety, comfort, legality, road citizenship, progress, and more. You’ll be part of a passionate team making transportation safer, smarter, and more sustainable. This role gives you high visibility within the company and is critical for successfully launching our autonomous driving software.

Vancouver

Who we are Established in 2017, Wayve is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, driven by breakthroughs in Embodied AI. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic technologies empower vehicles to navigate complex environments effortlessly. Supported by prominent investors, Wayve is advancing the transition from assisted to fully automated driving, making transportation safer, more efficient, and universally accessible. Join our world-class, multinational team of engineers and researchers as we push the boundaries of frontier AI and autonomous driving, creating impactful technologies and products on a global scale

We are seeking an experienced researcher to be a founding member of our Vancouver team! We are prioritising someone with experience leading projects in AI applied to autonomous driving or similar robotics or decision-making domains, inclusive, but not limited to the following specific areas: Foundation models for robotics or embodied AI Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning Offline reinforcement learning Large language models Planning with learned models, model predictive control and tree search Imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning and causal inference Learned agent models: behavioural, oral and physical models of cars, people, and other dynamic agents

Challenges you will own You'll be working on some of the world's hardest problems, and able to attack them in new ways. You'll be a technical leader within our diverse, cross-disciplinary team, helping teach our robots how to drive safely and comfortably in complex real-world environments. This encompasses many aspects of research across perception, prediction, planning, and control, including:

Actively contributing to the Science’s technical leadership community, inclusive of proposing new projects, organising their work, and delivering substantial impact across Wayve. Leveraging our large, rich, and diverse sources of real-world driving data Architecting our models to best employ the latest advances in foundation models, transformers, world models, etc, evaluating and incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into our workflows Investigating learning algorithms to use (e.g. reinforcement learning, behavioural cloning) Leveraging simulation for controlled experimental insight, training data augmentation, and re-simulation Scaling models efficiently across data, model size, and compute, while maintaining efficient deployment on the car Collaborating with cross-functional, international teams to integrate research findings into scalable, production-level solutions Potentially contributing to academic publications for top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, CVPR, ICRA, ICLR, CoRL etc. working in a world-class team, contributing to the scientific community and establishing Wayve as a leader in the field

What you will bring to Wayve Proven track record of research in one or more of the topics above demonstrated through deployed applications or publications. Experience leading a research agenda aligned with larger organisation or company goals Strong programming skills in Python, with experience in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, numpy, pandas, etc. Experience bringing a machine learning research concept through the full ML development cycle Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently as well as in a team environment. Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced, innovative, interdisciplinary team environment. Experience bringing an ML research concept through to production and at scale PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field

What we offer you The chance to be part of a truly mission driven organisation and an opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving. Unlike our competitors, Wayve is still relatively small and nimble, giving you the chance to make a huge impact