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Job Title: Founding Engineer, Systems & Infrastructure
Location | On-Site — San Francisco, CA
Time Zone | PST
Role Overview:
We are seeking a Founding Engineer to join the technical core 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 broader mission of making video generation fast, cheap, and programmable enough for AI to use anywhere it currently uses text. As a founding team member, you will focus on the low-level technical systems that determine speed, efficiency, and reliability — profiling real bottlenecks and designing clean solutions around complex internals. This role is built for someone who thinks naturally in terms of resource efficiency and enjoys solving hard technical problems most people never see.
Key Responsibilities:
Improve efficiency, speed, and reliability across core technical workflows
Debug performance issues across application code, media processing, and infrastructure
Build internal benchmarking and regression-testing tools
Optimize resource usage: concurrency, caching, batching, and scheduling
Create simple, well-designed interfaces around complex technical systems
Collaborate closely with the product team without sacrificing technical depth
Required Qualifications:
Strong fundamentals in systems engineering — latency, throughput, memory, CPU/GPU, I/O
Track record of improving performance in production environments
Proficiency in C++ or a comparable low-level language, plus backend engineering skills
Rigorous approach to measuring before optimizing
Comfortable using AI tools to move faster, while independently defining and solving problems
Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CA
Preferred Qualifications:
Background in robotics, embedded systems, or electronics engineering
Comfort operating below the product surface, in less visible technical layers
History of specific, measurable performance improvements shipped to production
Tools & Technology:
C++ or similar low-level languages
Backend/API frameworks and databases
Cloud infrastructure and deployment tooling
AI-assisted development tools
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