Senior Platform Engineer, Hedra
+ Equity
Creation lab building foundation models for next-gen human storytelling
Posted today
Creation lab building foundation models for next-gen human storytelling
1-20 employees
Posted today
+ Equity
1-20 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
- At least 4+ years of experience building developer platforms, internal tooling, or platform engineering at technology companies
- Platform API design and building internal developer tooling, CLIs, and self-service portals for infrastructure resources
- Kubernetes platform expertise including building abstractions, operators, custom resources, and developer-friendly deployment workflows
- Infrastructure as Code mastery with Terraform for creating reusable modules and standardized infrastructure patterns
- Developer experience focus with experience building internal platforms that reduce cognitive load for engineering teams
- Container platform design including image registries, security scanning, and standardized base images for AI/ML workloads
- Service templating and standardization using tools like Helm, Kustomize, or custom controllers for consistent deployments
- Platform observability implementing centralized logging, metrics, and tracing that developers can easily consume
- Self-service automation building workflows that allow teams to provision resources without platform team intervention
- Cost transparency and governance implementing resource quotas, cost allocation, and usage visibility across teams
- Security by default designing platform services with built-in security controls, secrets management, and compliance guardrails
- Multi-tenancy and isolation ensuring teams can work independently while sharing platform resources safely
- 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)
- Developer advocacy mindset with experience gathering requirements from engineering teams and translating them into platform capabilities
- Scalable platform architecture for supporting rapid team growth and varying workload demands
- Self-motivated and independent — able to set accurate timelines for infrastructure projects and deliver on them. Have an opinion and the experience to backup that opinion
- Low ego, high patience, strong communication skills
- Understand platform economics and developer productivity short and long term, with a focus on building tools that accelerate engineering velocity
- 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 technical vision accordingly
What the job involves
- As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will design and build the internal developer platform that empowers our engineering teams to deploy, scale, and manage our transformative AI-powered products efficiently
- You will create self-service infrastructure tooling, abstract away complexity from developers, and build the foundational platform capabilities that enable rapid innovation on our Character-3 foundation model
- You will architect developer-friendly APIs and interfaces for infrastructure resources, build automated provisioning workflows using Terraform, and create standardized deployment patterns on Kubernetes
- Your work will focus on enabling engineering teams to ship faster while maintaining reliability, security, and cost efficiency
- You'll design platform services that abstract the underlying complexity of our multi-modal AI workloads and video processing infrastructure
- You will partner with product engineers and researchers to understand their needs and translate them into scalable platform solutions
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. Describing itself as a video foundation mode company, Hedra is building an online creation studio that 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. Its most recent product is Character1, a video foundation model for longer-form video generation focusing on customizable AI-generated video characters.
Since Character1’s release in June 2024, more than 1.6 million videos have been generated via the platform, demonstrating the need for its August seed funding round. The $10 million investment will be channelled into developing new technology like a multimodal studio and workflow tool to complement its foundation model.
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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