Founding Systems Engineer

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Job Title| Founding Systems Engineer (Performance)
Location | On-Site — San Francisco, CA
Time Zone | PST

Role Overview:
We are seeking a Founding Systems Engineer to join the earliest technical team at 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 vision to make video generation fast, cheap, and programmable enough for AI to use video anywhere it uses text today. This is one of three founding engineering hires, focused on the technical systems that make the core product fast, efficient, and high quality. The ideal candidate genuinely enjoys understanding real system behavior, profiling bottlenecks, improving difficult product paths, and building clean interfaces around complex internals. A background in robotics, embedded systems, or electronics engineering is a strong signal for the kind of systems-level thinking this role requires.

Key Responsibilities:
Improve speed, efficiency, quality, and reliability across core product workflows
Profile and debug bottlenecks across application code, media workflows, data movement, and infrastructure boundaries
Build benchmarking, regression tracking, and test harnesses for important system behavior
Improve concurrency, caching, batching, scheduling, and resource usage
Design internal interfaces that make complex technical systems easier for the rest of the product team to use
Work close to product needs while making deep technical improvements under the hood

Required Qualifications:
- Strong systems engineering fundamentals — you think naturally about latency, throughput, memory, CPU, GPU, I/O, and resource efficiency
- Experience improving production software where performance actually matters
- Proficiency in C++ or similar low-level languages, in addition to higher-level backend work
- Ability to measure before optimizing and explain tradeoffs concretely
- Good taste for building simple, clean abstractions around complex internals
- Comfortable using AI tools to move faster, while using personal judgment to define the problem and drive the solution
- Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CA

Preferred Qualifications:
- Background in robotics, embedded systems, or electronics engineering
- Comfort working below the obvious product surface when needed
- Track record of shipping specific, measurable performance improvements 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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Compensation (from employer):
Tier 1: $7K – $9K per month