Founding Engineer

About Our Work

Kino AI is building Cursor for video editing. We serve both top studios and YouTubers, and we make editing more productive and enjoyable. We're a deeply technical team from MIT, SpaceX, and NASA. We're backed by Y Combinator, AI Grant, and many others. Kino is about to launch a consumer product that’s already in use at major Hollywood studios. We need more engineers, deeper integration within current firms, and added capabilities. We’re very excited about this next phase!

What You'll Do

• Rapidly ingests and indexes users’ footage so that they can search, preview and compile standout moments with a Cursor-like UI and chat-powered workflow.
• Integrate with legacy apps like Adobe Premiere and serve the best AI models available.
• Engage in performant full stack web development in React, rendering large amounts of data.
• Develop asynchronous AI inference pipelines that improve Kino’s understanding of user footage.
• Systematically improve the Kino Agent, which edits footage on the user’s behalf via the Chat panel.
• Add additional capabilities to Kino’s agency over the user’s editing software (Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Davinci Resolve, etc.).
• Work in Postgres with real-time sync.
• Incorporate principles of fields that have been around for a long time: system design, computer graphics, information retrieval, computer vision, NLP, high performance web development, and filmmaking.
• Designs in Figma.

Tech Stack

• NextJS hosted on Vercel
• Tailwind
• Serverless GPU workers for media processing and AI analysis
• Python, Docker
• CUDA

About Your Background

• 3+ years of engineering experience
• Strong experience in React and web development, such that typical performance issues rarely appear
• Excellent understanding of web infrastructure (CORS, HTTPS, CDNs, etc)
• Good intuition of what our unique customers actually care about (search quality, video playback, edit quality, snappiness)
• Experience in video, graphics, and GPU intensive workloads is a massive plus

About You

• Fast - you maintain a high quality at a top speed
• You communicate when things will be done and stick to those deadlines
• If there's a slowdown or failed experiment, you'll let us know immediately
• Agency + ability to learn on your own
• Ruthlessly prioritize - you work closely with the CEO and other engineers to prioritize what’s important and what can wait
• You are eager to tackle hard engineering problems: massive simultaneous video playback, maintaining customer data privacy, rendering massive lists of data
• You enjoy talking to our users: you realize we are offering a service, not just a product, and you will work to proactively service our customers at every step
• Excited to embrace the Hamming question: Is this the most important thing to be working on right now?

Logistics

• This is a full-time, in-person opportunity in San Francisco
• We're big believers in in-person culture
• We are open to sponsoring International candidates (e.g STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3)
• $120,000 - $185,000 a year
• 0.75% - 2.5% equity
• Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area