We're building the future of storytelling and video editing.
We're a small team that moves fast and builds things we're proud of.
We care obsessively about taste: in design, in product, in every detail.
We're solving these hard problems.
We're backed by a Tier-1 global fund, YC, and founders of billion dollar companies.
Cardboard is a video editor you can talk to. In a product like ours, how things move and respond isn't a finishing touch. It's the product.
We're hiring a Founding Design Engineer to own how Cardboard feels and how people see it: in the product, and on the pages and launches where they first meet us. You design in code and ship it yourself.
What you'll ownThe feel of the editor: timeline, preview, and the chat with our agent.
Motion, shaders, and the visual effects people put in their videos.
How people perceive Cardboard: marketing pages, launch moments, and experiments.
Interface guidelines for the team and the UI our agents write.
You've shipped interfaces and launches people talk about.
You know easing and timing deeply, and you have opinions about 80ms vs 300ms.
You're solid in React, CSS, and WebGL, and you can profile a dropped frame.
Bonus: creative tools, or WebGPU.
You own outcomes, not tickets: decide what to build, ship it, and check it worked.
You talk to users and look at the data.
You build with AI agents every day, and you're the taste and judgment in the loop.
Within your first six months:
The editor feels noticeably faster and calmer.
Our marketing pages and launches set the bar for how Cardboard looks.
The UI our agents write follows guidelines you set.
You'd be surrounded by people who are absurdly good at what they do. One started coding at 11 and shipped an app with 6M+ downloads in high school. One got into CS engineering at 14 and has been working on distributed systems for 8+ years. One's an ex-founder who took a company to 1.2M users and $300M+ in transactions. That's the team. We're looking for someone who'll raise the bar on technical craftsmanship and creative product quality. Apart from that you'd get:
Competitive salary and founding-team equity.
Unlimited tokens across every AI model. Use whatever you want, as much as you want.
A healthy budget for AI tools and any peripherals you need to do your best work.
Skills Required
- Deep knowledge of animation easing and timing principles
- Fluency with GSAP, Framer Motion, and Three.js
- Experience with shaders, dither effects, and SVG animation performance
- Strong WebGL and GLSL knowledge, including rendering pipelines
- Frontend performance optimization and browser profiling experience
- Ability to optimize memory usage for large media projects and extended editing sessions
- Excitement about WebGPU
What We Do
Cardboard, Inc. develops an agentic, browser-based AI video editor for growth and marketing teams and serious creators. Users can describe an intended edit in natural language, while the product cuts, captions, reframes, composes, and searches footage. Its browser-native workflow combines a multi-layer timeline, collaboration, auto-captioning, voiceover and music generation, and exports for professional finishing applications, helping teams produce and iterate videos faster.
