Backend Engineer

Computer Vision & Backend Engineer (60-Day Build)

Company: WowNom

Type: Fixed-term contract (60 days, full-time) — extension possible

Location: Remote (Singapore Time, APAC-friendly hours)

How to apply

Email hello@wownom.com with subject “60-Day CV & Backend Build — WowNom” and include:

• A shipped CV project (repo/demo) + one latency and one accuracy number you achieved and how

• Availability to start within 1–2 weeks and timezone

• (Optional) A brief note on grams estimation from depth vs. monocular on plated dishes

Mission (60 days)

Deliver a production-ready photo recognition system that powers a calorie-counting app end-to-end:

• Upload → Analyze → Nutrition: From a food photo, return { name, grams, confidence, tags, ingredients, macros } per item, with meal totals and remaining daily targets.

• Retraining option: Design and ship the infrastructure that learns from user corrections (renames, grams/macros edits) and can retrain/evaluate safely.

What you will build (end-to-end scope)

• Public APIs

• POST /api/vision/upload (multipart JPEG/PNG/WebP) → { name, grams, confidence, tags }[]

• POST /api/coach/photo → persist image, call vision, run lookupFood, return items, meal totals, remaining Daily, and coachReply

• Food analysis (multi-cuisine)

• Gate + Instances: YOLOv8/11 detect (food vs distractors) → YOLO-seg (retina masks)

• Naming: SigLIP/CLIP (or compact ViT) on mask crops, synonyms/taxonomy aware

• Safety: OOD detector + low-confidence suggestions; safe abstain (no hallucinations)

• Portioning (grams)

• Device-depth first (if present), monocular fallback (MiDaS/ZoeDepth), tabletop plane-fit, coverage %, density lookup (Redis), portion_source=device|mono|heuristic

• Nutrition & ingredients

• Map labels → canonical taxonomy (≤400 dishes)

• Query our nutrition DB or external sources (e.g., FDC) to assemble ingredients + per-ingredient macros, scale by grams, compute meal totals

• Retraining loop (feedback → model)

• Capture user edits & low-margin/OOD crops → store to ClickHouse/S3

• Scripts & jobs to rebuild datasets, fine-tune, evaluate with metric gates, and publish new artifacts safely

• Ops & safety

• CI evaluator (Top-1/Top-5, OOD FP rate, Portion MAPE, latency SLOs) that blocks regressions

• Observability: structured logs, per-stage ms, model/taxonomy versions

• Privacy: consent gate, retention/“delete my images” flow

60-Day milestone plan (acceptance-driven)

Week 1–2 (Foundation & API)

• Stand up GPU FastAPI /infer-v2 + Node /api/coach/photo

• Return stubbed payload matching contract; basic telemetry; dockerized

• Demo: curl upload → JSON schema exactly matches app contract

Week 3–4 (Models & Portions)

• YOLO gate+seg (export ONNX); CLIP/SigLIP naming with temperature scaling

• Depth-aware grams (device depth) + mono fallback; density via Redis

• Demo: multi-cuisine sample set returns names + grams within sanity bounds

Week 5 (Nutrition & Safety)

• Taxonomy (≤400) + nutrition mapping (our DB / FDC)

• OOD abstain with suggestions; ingredients + per-ingredient macros scaled by grams

• Demo: App-ready payload { name, grams, confidence, tags, ingredients, macros } per item; meal totals & remainingDaily

Week 6–8 (Retraining + CI gates + Canary)

• Feedback capture from user edits; dataset rebuild scripts; fine-tune path

• Evaluator + CI gates (json report) and shadow/canary rollout toggles

• Privacy & retention wired; runbook + handover docs

• Final Demo (Day 60): end-to-end flow on staging GPU; retrain on a small corrected set; CI passes; canary toggle ready

Success metrics (set at kickoff; used by CI gate)

• Quality: Top-1 on core ≥ target; OOD FP ≤ target; Portion MAPE ≤ target on depth images

• Latency: p50 ≤ 350 ms, p95 ≤ 800 ms on our staging GPU

• Reliability: CI gate prevents regressions; logs/metrics complete; consent & retention enforced

Minimum qualifications

• Shipped computer-vision systems to production (beyond notebooks)

• YOLO detect/seg training or fine-tuning; export to ONNX/TensorRT and debug opsets/dynamic shapes

• CLIP/SigLIP or ViT classifier work (fine-tune + temperature scaling); OOD thresholding

• Depth pipelines (device + monocular), geometric reasoning (plane fitting, coverage)

• Production APIs (FastAPI/Node), Redis/ClickHouse (or similar), Docker, GitHub Actions

• Obs/ops: structured logging, latency profiling, privacy/retention patterns

Nice-to-haves

• Triton Inference Server, FAISS/ANN, K8s/Helm, W&B/MLflow

• Nutrition data integration (FDC or equivalent), taxonomy design

Tech you’ll touch

PyTorch, Ultralytics YOLOv8/11, SAM/SAM2, SigLIP/CLIP, MiDaS/ZoeDepth, ONNX Runtime (CUDA EP), TensorRT (nice), FastAPI, Node/Express, Redis, ClickHouse, Docker, GitHub Actions.

What we provide

• GPU access (cloud, H100/A10/T4), seed datasets & taxonomy draft, staging infra, and rapid product feedback

• Clear API contract and benchmark packs for CI gating

How to apply

Email hello@wownom.com with subject “60-Day CV & Backend Build — WowNom” and include:

• A shipped CV project (repo/demo) + one latency and one accuracy number you achieved and how

• Availability to start within 1–2 weeks and timezone

• (Optional) A brief note on grams estimation from depth vs. monocular on plated dishes