Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer, Full Stack
Web-Based Transmedia Creation Suite

Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Remote) 

Type: FTE

Salary Range:  $180,000-200,000 + equity

About the role

We’re building a modern, browser-based media creation suite designed for rapid iteration in an AI-driven world. This is a startup environment: small team, high ownership, fast shipping, and shifting paradigms. We’re looking for a hands-on Staff Engineer who’s excited to be deep in the codebase every day, delivering features end-to-end and materially improving how the system is built.

You’ll bring strong technical judgment and a point of view, and you’ll influence through execution: writing great code, making pragmatic tradeoffs, and helping the team move faster together.

Where we’re headed
We’re building a film creation suite grounded in real creative workflows and amplified by AI. We’re starting with tools that support pre-production and production, and we’re excited to expand into post and transmedia over time. This isn’t “a video editor in the browser” or a generative slot machine. It’s an IP creation engine: creator-led, fast, and built to meet creatives where they already work, without slowing them down.

This isn’t a single-tool workflow like Photoshop, or a prompt-first UI like ComfyUI. It’s an output-driven media creation suite built to scale IP and to help teams produce Wonder-level content.

Our products are output-focused (each one ships something specific), but they share a unified toolkit and UI system across the stack to reduce onboarding, keep workflows consistent, and make iteration faster. As we grow, we’ll plug in more tools, models, and technologies, including 3D and game-dev ecosystems, to give creatives real leverage.

What you’ll do

• Ship end-to-end features across our Next.js frontend and Python API backend.
• Design and build systems for media creation: asset ingestion, processing, preview generation, rendering/export, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Own technical outcomes: take ambiguous requirements and turn them into scalable, maintainable implementations.
• Bring 3D/game-dev tooling thinking into the product: scene/asset graphs, deterministic pipelines, versioning, caching, reproducibility, and performance-aware workflows.
• Improve reliability and velocity: refactors, testing strategy, CI/CD, observability, performance, cost controls, and operational readiness.
• Raise the engineering bar through mentorship and reviews—without becoming “meetings-only.”
  
  

Our stack

• Frontend: Next.js (React / TypeScript)
• Backend: Python API service (integrations + orchestration across external services/APIs)
• Testing: Vitest (frontend), Pytest (backend)
• Infra/Platforms: GCP, Railway, Vercel
• Integrations/Compute: fal, Modal (and a growing set of AI/media APIs)
• Workflow: Git-based development, modern CI/CD

What we’re looking for

• Senior-to-staff level experience owning production systems end-to-end.
• Strong full-stack capability: you can work comfortably across Next.js + Python APIs, and debug across boundaries.
• Startup mindset: high ownership, high output, low ego, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Strong system design instincts: you can build fast without creating a fragile mess.
• Excellent collaboration: clear communicator, strong reviewer, productive partner to product/design.
• We’re optimizing for people who’ve shipped creative tooling at scale (not primarily genAI experimentation).

Table-stakes for this role

• Strong familiarity with industry-standard media creation tools and workflows. You understand how professional teams build, manage, and ship content across pre/pro/post.
• Experience designing and supporting media pipelines end-to-end (assets, timelines/projects, processing, preview/render/export), with an instinct for reliability, performance, and iteration speed.
• Comfort working in the “messy middle” between creative UX and engineering constraints: formats/codecs, storage, caching, background jobs, and scaling production workflows.

Nice-to-haves

• Familiarity with 3D and game-dev-adjacent concepts (scene/asset graphs, rendering constraints, asset versioning/caching, performance-minded workflows).
• You don’t need to be an Unreal/Blender power user - just comfortable with how those ecosystems work and how teams build around them.

Strongly preferred

• Experience at companies like Adobe, CapCut/ByteDance, Canva, or other creation tooling orgs.
• Experience building media-heavy products (video/photo/audio editors, asset management, render/export pipelines).
• Experience orchestrating external APIs and compute services (async pipelines, retries, idempotency, cost/perf tradeoffs).
  Comfort with browser constraints for heavy workflows (large state, complex UI, performance profiling, memory awareness).

What success looks like

• First 30 days: shipping meaningful PRs, learning the product quickly, improving a foundational area (DX, tests, performance, reliability).
• First 60 days: owning a significant feature or system improvement end-to-end.
• First 90 days: establishing technical direction in 1–2 major areas (media pipeline, asset/project architecture, transmedia/3D integration patterns) while continuing to ship.

How we work

• We move fast and iterate, but we care about building systems that stay fast.
• We value people who are opinionated and flexible: decisive when needed, adaptable when reality changes.
• This is not a “delegation-only” Staff role. We want someone hands-on, writing code, reviewing PRs, and unblocking the team.