Join Hire Hangar and work with fast-growing global companies while building a long-term career.
Job Title: Founding Performance Engineer
Location | On-Site — San Francisco, CA
Time Zone | PST
Role Overview:
We are seeking a Founding Performance Engineer to help build the technical backbone of a fast-moving AI video infrastructure startup. The company's first product turns prompts and documents into whiteboard-style explainer videos in seconds, with a bigger goal of making video generation as fast, cheap, and programmable as text generation is today. As one of the first engineering hires, you'll own the systems that determine how fast and efficient the product feels — going deep on real bottlenecks rather than surface-level fixes. This role suits someone who is energized by understanding exactly how software behaves under load, and who enjoys turning messy internals into clean, fast, dependable systems.
Key Responsibilities:
Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks across code, media pipelines, and infrastructure
Build tools for benchmarking, regression tracking, and performance testing
Optimize concurrency, caching, batching, and scheduling across core workflows
Improve GPU and compute resource utilization
Design clean internal interfaces around complex, performance-critical systems
Partner with the product team to keep improvements invisible but impactful to users
Required Qualifications:
Strong grasp of systems fundamentals: latency, throughput, memory, CPU/GPU, and I/O
Experience improving performance in real production software
Proficiency in C++ or a similar low-level language, alongside backend development skills
Ability to measure rigorously before optimizing, and explain tradeoffs clearly
Comfortable using AI tools to increase speed, while relying on personal judgment to define and solve problems
Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CA
Preferred Qualifications:
Background in robotics, embedded systems, or electronics engineering
Comfortable working deep in the stack, below user-facing features
Demonstrated history of measurable performance wins in production systems
Tools & Technology:
C++ or similar low-level languages
Backend/API frameworks and databases
Cloud infrastructure and deployment tooling
AI-assisted development tools
We connect top talent with vetted employers, competitive pay, and real growth opportunities.