Senior / Staff Backend Engineer, Hedra
$175-275k
+ Equity
AI lab empowering creation with AI
Open for applications
AI lab empowering creation with AI
21-100 employees
Open for applications
$175-275k
+ Equity
21-100 employees
Company mission
To build foundation models into products that power the next generation of human storytelling.
Role
Who you are
- You should have start-up experience and be a self-starter that is driven to build impactful products that change the status quo
- Experience developing scalable services using Python
- Experience developing RESTFUL APIs using frameworks such as FastAPI and Pydantic
- Familiarity with authentication / authorization, utilizing standards such as oauth2, OIDC, and JWT
- Experience working with relational and noSQL datastores (such as DynamoDB)
- Experience writing unit and integration tests and working with CI/CD and dev-containers
- Experience writing scalable, async code and leveraging asyncio, generators, coroutines
- Experience building and scaling cloud-based infrastructure leveraging Kubernetes and EKS
- Familiarity with AWS IAM, IRSA, ALB/NLB, route53, S3, lambda
- Familiarity leveraging schema-registry, and serialization protocols such as avro, parquet, and JSON-schema
- Experience developing/scaling pipelines, event streaming/processing in AWS, using tools such as SQS or Kafka
- Startup Experience is a must — we work hard and build quickly. Ideal candidates should be passionate with an always-on attitude that drives them to live and breathe the product (not a “punch the clock” disposition)
- Experience architecting and implementing REST APIs for distributed systems
- Experience with k8s, docker, especially in the context of deploying machine learning models on nvidia hardware
- Familiarity with audio/video web standards and tools, such as Webcodecs, webRTC, HLS, MP-DASH, FFMPEG, MP4, and MKV a plus
- At least 5 years of professional Python or Golang
- Self-motivated and independent — able to set accurate timelines for development and deliver on them. Have an opinion and the experience to backup that opinion
- Low ego, high patience, strong communication skills
- Understand operational costs and overhead short and long term
- Mission-driven — we are building something fundamentally disruptive and this reflects deeply in our company DNA
- And most importantly, treat Hedra as your own and help shape the vision accordingly
What the job involves
- As we continue to expand, we're seeking a dynamic individual to lead marketing and propel Hedra to new heights
- As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, build, and deploy the backend services that power our transformative products, including Create, Stylize, and Studio
- You will work with web and video standards to power our suite of web-based video and audio creation / editing tools
- You will also dive deep into video container formats and streaming protocols, such as MP4, MKV, HLS, and MP-DASH, and work with tools such as FFMPEG
- You will also work on building and deploying backend services and APIs to our Kubernetes infrastructure, write secure, stable, and scalable Python code, interface with our ground-breaking foundation model, and integrate with SQS, Kafka, S3, and DynamoDB to implement event streaming/processing logic
- You will work with passionate engineers and top researchers to build a truly disruptive and novel technology
Our take
The relationship between machine learning and online content has grown closer in recent years, and Hedra is a video content platform that is pushing this symbiosis into new territory. Working as a content engine, Hedra's online creation studio helps users generate dialogue, audio and video from words.
As a digital presence automation tool, Hedra is moving beyond the likes of DallE and generative AI video content into more nuanced territory. For example, its product known as Character is a video foundation model for longer-form video generation focusing on customizable AI-generated video characters.
Between the version one release of Character in June 2024 and the company's fundraise that same August, more than 1.6 million videos had already been generated via the platform. This demonstrates the demand that exists for Hedra's offering. A new fundraise in 2025, which reportedly takes the company’s valuation to $200 million, will support the advancement of the quality and controllability of its models.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
May 2025
$32m
SERIES A
Aug 2024
$10m
SEED
Total funding: $42m
Company benefits
- Equity
- 401k (no match)
- Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)
- Gym access (at our office)
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Michael Lingelbach
(Founder & CEO)Previously Regina Casper Graduate Research Fellow at Stanford University, was an Intern at NVIDIA, Postbaccaulaureate researcher at Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a Scholar at the Janelia Research Campus.
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