Founding Software Engineer

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Job Title: Founding Low-Level Software Engineer

Location | On-Site - San Francisco, CA

Time Zone | PST

Role Overview:

We are seeking a Founding Low-Level Software Engineer to join an early-stage AI video infrastructure startup. The company's first product turns prompts and documents into whiteboard-style explainer videos in seconds, working toward a bigger vision of making video generation as fast, cheap, and programmable as text is today. As one of the first engineering hires, you will focus on the deep technical work that keeps the product fast and efficient at scale - profiling bottlenecks, tuning resource usage, and building clean abstractions around genuinely complex internals. This role is a strong fit for someone who enjoys working close to the metal and has a track record of measurable technical impact.

Key Responsibilities:

Improve speed, efficiency, and reliability across core technical systems

Profile and resolve bottlenecks in code, media pipelines, and infrastructure

Build tooling for benchmarking, testing, and tracking system regressions

Tune concurrency, caching, batching, and scheduling for better resource use

Design clean internal interfaces that hide complexity from the rest of the team

Stay close to product priorities while solving deep technical problems

Required Qualifications:

Strong systems thinking - comfortable reasoning about latency, throughput, memory, CPU/GPU, and I/O

Proven experience improving performance in production software

Proficiency in C++ or a similar low-level language, along with backend development experience

Disciplined approach to measuring before optimizing

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 below the obvious product surface

Specific examples of performance improvements delivered in 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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