What It's Like to Work at VSCO

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

At VSCO, we’re building a web-based multiplayer product that transforms how photographers and clients collaborate using moodboards. Powered by generative AI, the tool accelerates the creative process, helping users unlock their artistic vision more quickly. The journey into our inner creativity can be slow and difficult. This tool acts as a catalyst, organizing and expanding early concepts into something new, unique and striking. It sparks photoshoot inspiration, ignites momentum and serves as a valuable companion for visual storytelling.

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges will you need to overcome in the process?

Over the course of the first quarter of 2025, we’ll have several beta test launches to collect feedback and iterate on the product, targeting a launch late in the first quarter. To help with AI model development, refinement and scalability, we’ve worked closely with CloudFlare. The engineers there have been gracious, kind and extremely helpful. We’ve used a SaaS API platform for the collaboration aspects of the product. It is a data store which solves the problem of conflict-free concurrent writes to the same document and has worked flawlessly so far.

We’ve had a challenge with ensuring high performance of the Gen AI technology. First, with producing an acceptable quality in an acceptable amount of time, and second, with being able to predict how fast we can iterate on model improvements. The other big challenge is cost predictability. We have a high volume of unique visitors per month, so we’ve needed to prepare and come up with creative solutions for what a flood of traffic could do to our costs.

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

My primary skill set lies in building high-scale web applications with elaborate UX. Almost all of my past projects contributed in some way here, but two in particular stand out: The Republic Project, a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” rich media advertising creation and serving tool, essentially Photoshop for ads, with complex UI at high scale; and the Zwift website, which offers globally distributed e-commerce with rich UI. 

This project is built using many of the same technologies. My past experience brought the right mix of tools to this project, and development has been predictable, controlled and smooth. Where I hope to increase my depth, improve and learn is with Gen AI. I want to learn how to host, run and scale it, and put it to best use. I want VSCO to get really good at making technology more accessible to all of our creators. There is still a lot of opportunity to improve the user-friendliness of image generation technology. We’re going to build AI tools where our creators can feel in control — not just along for the ride, but firmly in the driver’s seat, accelerating their creativity with confidence.