Founding Engineer
We think the next consumer giant isn’t a feed. It’s creation.
GenTube: 10M+ creations/month. 50M+ remixes. Real users, real usage.
We’re hiring Engineer #3.
What this role actually is
→ You own the system end-to-end (frontend → backend → infra → models in prod)
→ You make creation feel instant (latency is the product)
→ You drive cost down without hurting quality
→ You keep the system running under load (queues, failures, fallbacks)
→ You ship continuously while everything is changing
Ship → measure → fix → repeat
The next 10 engineers will copy your standards.
What you’ll work on
→ Core loop: create → remix → repeat
→ Real-time generation (latency, cost, scale)
→ Feed + ranking (what gets seen, what gets built on)
Models aren’t the hard part. The system around them is.
Stack
TypeScript · React · Node · Convex
Real-time inference + large-scale image pipelines
Who you are
→ You’ve shipped systems people actually use
→ You optimize for speed and outcomes, not process
→ You’re comfortable owning messy, undefined problems
→ You care about latency, reliability, and cost as first-class problems
Exceptional new grads welcome if you’ve built real things.
Us
Toronto, in-person
Tiny team, shipping daily
Founders: scaled products to 100M+ users, $2B+ GMV, prior AI exit to Microsoft
Backed by top investors
Comp
$100–150K + meaningful equity
gentube.app
mo [at] gentube [dot] app
Skills Required
- Experience shipping production systems used by real users
- Ownership of end-to-end systems (frontend -> backend -> infra -> models in production)
- Expertise with TypeScript
- Expertise with React
- Expertise with Node
- Experience with Convex
- Experience building real-time inference systems and large-scale image pipelines
- Focus on latency, reliability, and cost optimization
- Comfort solving messy, undefined problems and shipping continuously
- Ability to work in-person in Toronto
- Open to exceptional new graduates who have built real products
What We Do
1851 Labs is a Toronto-based AI company that develops GenTube, a social AI art platform designed for fast, remixable image generation and collaborative creation. Their mission is to treat AI creation as entertainment, enabling users to instantly create and remix images with a focus on low-latency generation and intuitive, playful tools for a global community of creators.
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