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 Science is the team that is advancing our end-to-end autonomous driving research. The team’s mission is to accelerate our journey to AV2.0 and ensure the future success of Wayve by incubating and investing in new ideas that have the potential to become game-changing technological advances for the company.

As the first Research Manager in our Vancouver office, you will be responsible for managing & scaling a strong Science team in collaboration with other Wayve science teams in London and Mountain View. You will provide coaching and guidance to each of the researchers and engineers within your team and work with leaders across the company to ensure sustainable career growth for your team during a period of growth in the company. You will participate in our project-based operating model where your focus will be unlocking the potential of your team and its technical leaders to drive industry-leading impact. As part of your work, you will help identify the right projects to invest in, ensure the right allocation of resources to those projects, keep the team in good health, provide technical feedback to your team, share progress to build momentum, and build alignment and strong collaboration across the wider Science organisation. We are actively hiring and aim to substantially grow our research team over the next two years and you will be at the heart of this.

Challenges you will own Work closely with team members to develop career plans and growth trajectories based on each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and their own aspirations. Work closely with project leads to ensure team members are having strong impact and are set up for success. Work closely with project leads and Science leadership to ensure projects are resourced in a way that balances the needs of the business with the needs of the individuals. Offer coaching and technical mentorship to direct reports (especially project leads). Bring technical & project management expertise and experience to help accelerate our progress and decision-making. Challenge the status quo (both technical and organisational/process). Prioritize effectively and keep processes lean and effective. Partner with leadership to maintain a culture of cross-boundary collaboration, impact, innovation, and health. Grow the team as a hiring manager, to bring in complementary, diverse skill sets and backgrounds. Anticipate the needs of the business 6-24 months out, identify areas where additional resources are needed or we need to grow new domain expertise, and pitch this to leadership for investment. Contribute to the day-to-day running of the Science team’s operations and larger collaborative efforts.

Location Seattle, WA

Description Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing businesses. Amazon's advertising portfolio helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day!

The Creative X team within Amazon Advertising time aims to democratize access to high-quality creatives (images, videos) by building AI-driven solutions for advertisers. To accomplish this, we are investing in latent-diffusion models, large language models (LLM), computer vision (CV), reinforced learning (RL), and image + video and audio synthesis. You will be part of a close-knit team of applied scientists and product managers who are highly collaborative and at the top of their respective fields.

We are looking for talented Applied Scientists who are adept at a variety of skills, especially with computer vision, latent diffusion or related foundational models that will accelerate our plans to generate high-quality creatives on behalf of advertisers. Every member of the team is expected to build customer (advertiser) facing features, contribute to the collaborative spirit within the team, publish, patent, and bring cutting edge research to raise the bar within the team.

Canberra/Australia

We are looking for new outstanding PhD students for the upcoming scholarship round (application is due on 31st August 2024) at the Australian National University (ANU is ranked #30 in the QS Ranking 2025) or possibly at another Australian universities.

We are looking for new PhD students to work on new problems that may span over (but are not limited to) "clever" adapting of Foundation Models, LLMs, diffusion models (LORAs etc.,), NERF, or design of Graph Neural Networks, design of new (multi-modal) Self-supervised Learning and Contrastive Learning Models (masked models, images, videos, text, graphs, time series, sequences, etc. ) or adversarial and/or federated learning or other contemporary fundamental/applied problems (e.g., learning without backprop, adapting FMs to be less resource hungry, planning and reasoning, hyperbolic geometry, protein property prediction, structured output generative models, visual relation inference, incremental/learning to learn problems, low shot, etc.)

To succeed, you need an outstanding publication record, e.g., one or more first-author papers in venues such CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, IJCAI, ACM KDD, ACCV, BMVC, ACM MM, IEEE. Trans. On Image Processing, CVIU, IEEE TPAMI, or similar (the list is non-exhaustive). Non-first author papers will also help if they are in the mix. Some patents and/or professional experience in Computer Vision, Machine Learning or AI are a bonus. You also need a good GPA to succeed.

We are open to discussing your interests and topics, if you reach out, we can discuss what is possible. Yes, we have GPUs.

If you are interested, reach out for an informal chat with Dr. Koniusz. I am at CVPR if you want to chat?): piotr.koniusz@data61.csiro.au (or piotr.koniusz@anu.edu.au, www.koniusz.com)

Location Seattle, WA Arlington, VA New York, NY San Francisco, CA

Description Join us at the cutting edge of Amazon's sustainability initiatives to work on environmental and social advancements to support Amazon's long term worldwide sustainability strategy. At Amazon, we're working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people.

The Worldwide Sustainability (WWS) organization capitalizes on Amazon’s scale & speed to build a more resilient and sustainable company. We manage our social and environmental impacts globally, driving solutions that enable our customers, businesses, and the world around us to become more sustainable.

Sustainability Science and Innovation (SSI) is a multi-disciplinary team within the WW Sustainability organization that combines science, analytics, economics, statistics, machine learning, product development, and engineering expertise. We use this expertise and skills to identify, develop and evaluate the science and innovations necessary for Amazon, customers and partners to meet their long-term sustainability goals and commitments.

We’re seeking a Senior Principal Scientist for Sustainability and Climate AI to drive technical strategy and innovation for our long-term sustainability and climate commitments through AI & ML. You will serve as the strategic technical advisor to science, emerging tech, and climate pledge partners operating at the Director, VPs, and SVP level. You will set the next generation modeling standards for the team and tackle the most immature/complex modeling problems following the latest sustainability/climate sciences. Staying hyper current with emergent sustainability/climate science and machine learning trends, you'll be trusted to translate recommendations to leadership and be the voice of our interpretation. You will nurture a continuous delivery culture to embed informed, science-based decision-making into existing mechanisms, such as decarbonization strategies, ESG compliance, and risk management. You will also have the opportunity to collaborate with the Climate Pledge team to define strategies based on emergent science/tech trends and influence investment strategy. As a leader on this team, you'll play a key role in worldwide sustainability organizational planning, hiring, mentorship and leadership development.

If you see yourself as a thought leader and innovator at the intersection of climate science and tech, we’d like to connect with you.

Seattle, WA; Costa Mesa, CA; Boston, MA

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 ROLE We build Lattice, the foundation for everything we do as a defense technology company. Our engineers are talented and hard-working, motivated to see their work rapidly deployed on the front lines. Our team is not just building an experiment in waiting, we deploy what we build on the Southern border, Iraq, Ukraine and more.

We have open roles across Platform Engineering, ranging from core infrastructure to distributed systems, web development, networking and more. We hire self-motivated people, those who hold a higher bar for themselves than anyone else could hold for them. If you love building infrastructure, platform services, or just working in high performing engineering cultures we invite you to apply!

YOU SHOULD APPLY IF YOU: -At least 3+ years working with a variety of programming languages such as Rust, Go, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, etc. -Have experience working with customers to deliver novel software capabilities -Want to work on building and integrating model/software/hardware-in-the-loop components by leveraging first and third party technologies (related to simulation, data management, compute infrastructure, networking, and more). -Love building platform and infrastructure tooling that enables other software engineers to scale their output -Enjoy collaborating with team members and partners in the autonomy domain, and building technologies and processes which enable users to safely and rapidly develop and deploy autonomous systems at scale. -Are a U.S. Person because of required access to U.S. export controlled information

Note: The above bullet points describe the ideal candidate. None of us matched all of these at once when we first joined Anduril. We encourage you to apply even if you believe you meet only part of our wish list.

NICE TO HAVE -You've built or invented something: an app, a website, game, startup -Previous experience working in an engineering setting: a startup (or startup-like environment), engineering school, etc. If you've succeeded in a low structure, high autonomy environment you'll succeed here! -Professional software development lifecycle experience using tools such as version control, CICD systems, etc. -A deep, demonstrated understanding of how computers and networks work, from a single desktop to a multi-cluster cloud node -Experience building scalable backend software systems with various data storage and processing requirements -Experience with industry standard cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), CI/CD tools, and software infrastructure fundamentals (networking, security, distributed systems) -Ability to quickly understand and navigate complex systems and established code bases -Experience implementing robot or autonomous vehicle testing frameworks in a software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) environment -Experience with modern build and deployment tooling (e.g. NixOS, Terraform) -Experience designing complex software systems, and iterating upon designs via a technical design review process -Familiarity with industry standard monitoring, logging, and data management tools and best practices -A bias towards rapid delivery and iteration

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

Location Seattle, WA New York, NY

Description We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join our Seattle team. As an Applied Scientist, you are able to use a range of science methodologies to solve challenging business problems when the solution is unclear. Our team solves a broad range of problems ranging from natural knowledge understanding of third-party shoppable content, product and content recommendation to social media influencers and their audiences, determining optimal compensation for creators, and mitigating fraud. We generate deep semantic understanding of the photos, and videos in shoppable content created by our creators for efficient processing and appropriate placements for the best customer experience. For example, you may lead the development of reinforcement learning models such as MAB to rank content/product to be shown to influencers. To achieve this, a deep understanding of the quality and relevance of content must be established through ML models that provide those contexts for ranking.

In order to be successful in our team, you need a combination of business acumen, broad knowledge of statistics, deep understanding of ML algorithms, and an analytical mindset. You thrive in a collaborative environment, and are passionate about learning. Our team utilizes a variety of AWS tools such as SageMaker, S3, and EC2 with a variety of skillset in shallow and deep learning ML models, particularly in NLP and CV. You will bring knowledge in many of these domains along with your own specialties.

Seattle, US

Our Company Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe’s all about. We give everyone—from emerging artists to global brands—everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. We’re passionate about empowering people to craft beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, and transform how companies interact with customers across every screen.

We’re on a mission to hire the very best and are committed to building exceptional employee experiences where everyone is respected and has access to equal opportunity. We realize that new ideas can come from everywhere in the organization, and we know the next big idea could be yours!

The Opportunity Photoshop ART is seeking a Research Scientist to join our inpainting R&D team focused on making significant progress in image generation/restoration, low level vision, image editing with an eventual posture toward productization. Individuals in this role are expected to be expert in identified research areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, and image processing. The ideal candidate will have a keen interest in producing new science to advance Adobe products.

What you'll Do Work towards long-term results-oriented research goals, while identifying intermediate achievements. Contribute to research that can be applied to Adobe product development. Help integrating novel research work into Adobe’s product. Lead and collaborate on research projects across different Adobe divisions. What you need to succeed Ph.D. and solid publications in machine learning, AI, computer science, statistics, or scene semantic understanding. Experience communicating research for public audiences of peers. Experience working in teams. Knowledge in a programming language. Preferred Qualification 2 years of professional full-time experience preferred, but not required 2+ year(s) of internship with primary emphasis on AI research in image generation, low level vision, image restoration, and segmentation Experience in collaboration with a team with varied strengths. 4+ First-author publications at peer-reviewed AI conferences (e.g. NIPS, CVPR, ECCV, ICML, ICLR, ICCV, and ACL). Experience in developing and debugging in Python. At Adobe, you will be immersed in an exceptional work environment that is recognized throughout the world on Best Companies lists. You will also be surrounded by colleagues who are committed to helping each other grow through our unique Check-In approach where ongoing feedback flows freely.

If you’re looking to make an impact, Adobe's the place for you. Discover what our employees are saying about their career experiences on the Adobe Life blog and explore the meaningful benefits we offer.

Adobe is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome and encourage diversity in the workplace regardless of gender, race or color, ethnicity or national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or veteran status.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several  U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $129,400 -- $242,200 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-relate

We are seeking a highly motivated candidate for a fully funded PhD 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 PhD student 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).

The start date of the position is September 01, 2024. The position is fully funded for 4 years by Science Foundation Ireland.

The successful candidate will require the following skills and knowledge: • Bachelor or Master in Computer Science or related fields; • Strong competence in computer graphics, computer vision; • Solid experience in academic research and publications is an advantage; • Additional background in math, statistics, or physics is an advantage. • Hands-on experience in training deep models; • Hands-on experience in computer graphics and computer vision application development such as OpenGL, OpenCV, CUDA, Blender; • Strong programming skills in C++, Python. Capability in implementing systems based on open-source software.

Applicants should provide the following information: • A comprehensive CV; • Academic transcripts of Bachelor and Master’s degree; • The name and contact details of two referees.

Interested candidates can email Binh-Son Hua (https://sonhua.github.io) for an informal discussion of the position. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position has been filled.

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.

San Jose, CA

B GARAGE was founded in 2017 by a Ph.D. graduate from Stanford University. After having spent over five years researching robotics, computer vision, aeronautics, and drone autonomy, the founder and team set their minds on building a future where aerial robots would become an integral part of our daily lives without anyone necessarily piloting them. Together, our common goal is to redefine the user experience of drones and to expand the horizon for the use of drones.

Roles and Responsibilities

Design and develop perception for aerial robot and inventory recognition for warehouses by leveraging computer vision and deep learning techniques

Aid the computer vision team to deliver prototype and product in a timely manner

Collaborate with other teams within the company

Minimum Qualifications

M.S. degree in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering, or other engineering disciplines

10+ years of experience with computer vision and machine learning

Proficient in image processing algorithms and multiple view geometry using camera

Experience with machine learning architectures for object detection, segmentation, text recognition etc.

Proficient with ROS, C++, and Python

Experience with popular computer vision and GPU frameworks/libraries (e.g., OpenCV,TensorFlow, PyTorch, CUDA, cuDNN etc.)

Proficient in containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and container orchestration technologies

Experience in cloud computing platforms (AWS, GCP, etc.)

Experience with robots operating on real-time onboard processing

Self-motivated person who thrives in a fast-paced environment

Good problem solving and troubleshooting skills

Legally authorized to work in the United States

Optional Qualifications

Ph.D. degree in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering, or other engineering disciplines

Experience with scene reconstruction, bundle adjustment and factor graph optimization libraries

Experience with Javascript and massively parallel cloud computing technologies involving Kafka, Spark, MapReduce

Published research papers in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, etc.

Company Benefits

Competitive compensation packages

Medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and 401(k)

Flexible vacation and paid holidays

Complimentary lunches and snacks

Professional development reimbursement (online courses, conference, exhibit, etc.)

B GARAGE stands for an open and respectful corporate culture because we believe diversity helps us to find new perspectives.

B GARAGE ensures that all our members have equal opportunities – regardless of age, ethnic origin and nationality, gender and gender identity, physical and mental abilities, religion and belief, sexual orientation, and social background. We always ensure diversity right from the recruitment stage and therefore make hiring decisions based on a candidate’s actual competencies, qualifications, and business needs at the point of the time.

Redmond, Washington, United States

Overview Microsoft Research (MSR) AI Frontiers lab is seeking applications for the position of Principal Researcher – Generative AI to join their team.

The mission of the AI Frontiers lab is to expand the pareto frontier of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, efficiency, and safety through innovations in foundation models and learning agent platforms. Some of our projects include work on Small Language Models (e.g. Phi, Orca) and Multi-Agent AI (e.g. AutoGen).

We are seeking a Principal Researcher – Generative AI to join our team and lead efforts on the advancement of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) technologies. As a Principal Researcher – Generative AI, you will play a crucial role in leading, developing, improving, and exploring the capabilities of Generative AI models. Your work will have a significant impact on the development of cutting-edge technologies, advancing state-of-the-art and providing practical solutions to real-world problems.  

Our ongoing research areas encompass but are not limited to:

Pre-training: especially of small language and multimodal models Alignment and Post-training: e.g., Instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from feedback Continual Learning: Enabling LLMs to evolve and adapt over time and learn from previous experiences human interactions Specialization: Tailoring LLMs to meet application-specific requirements Orchestration and multi-agent systems: automated orchestration between multiple agents incorporating human feedback and oversight

MSR offers a vibrant environment for cutting-edge, multidisciplinary, research, including access to diverse, real-world problems and data, opportunities for experimentation and real-world impact, an open publication policy, and close links to top academic institutions around the world.

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 You will perform cutting-edge research in collaboration with other researchers, engineers, and product groups.
As a member of a word-class research organization, you will be a part of research breakthroughs in the field and will be given an opportunity to realize your ideas in products and services used worldwide. Embody our culture and values.

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.

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