Lead Product Engineer

About Hedra:

Hedra is a pioneering video foundation model company founded by former Stanford PhDs and backed by top investors at Index, A16Z, and Abstract Ventures. We're building a full-stack creation studio capable of control, emotion, and creative intelligence.

We raised 10 million dollars in our seed round to revolutionize content creation. Our flagship product, the Character foundation model, launched in late June and garnered national attention, landing us on the top of Reddit (multiple times!) and Twitter. In early October we released Character-2, which has already produced highly creative and viral content.

Note: At Hedra, we’re a team of hard-working, passionate individuals seeking to fundamentally change content and build a generational company together. You should have start-up experience and be a self-starter that is driven to build impactful products that change the status quo. You must be willing to work in-person in either NYC or SF.

Summary:

As a Lead Product Engineer, you will design, build, and deploy the frontend and backend services that power our transformative products, including Studio and Stylize. You will work with emerging web standards to build web-based video and audio creation / editing tools, utilizing Webcodecs, web-assembly, and FFMPEG. You will also work with frameworks/languages such as NextJS, React, Redux, Mobx, Typescript, and Javascript, and dive deep into video container formats and streaming protocols, such as MP4, MKV, HLS, and MP-DASH.

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. We’re looking for full-time hires for our New York or San Francisco offices.

Must-Have Experience:

• 5+ years of professional experience with Javascript, React, NextJS, and Typescript.

• Experience working closely with design and product to set and deliver engineering initiatives and projects.

• A product-focused engineer who is passionate about the user experience and empowering creatives.

• Familiarity with audio/video web standards and tools, such as Webcodecs and webRTC.

• 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).

• Familiarity with authentication / authorization such as oauth2 and OIDC

Nice-To-Have Experience:

• Experience developing scalable services using Python or Golang.

• Experience working with relational and noSQL datastores (such as DynamoDB)

• Experience writing unit and integration tests, working with CI/CD, and writing functional-tests using tools such as Playwright.

• Strong familiarity with frameworks / standards / concepts such as websockets, IndexedDB, promises, generators, and coroutines.

• Experience integrating with REST APIs for distributed systems.

Personality:

• 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

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation and equity.

• 401k.

• Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental).

• Gym access.

About the Founders:

Michael Lingelbach (CEO) - Before taking a leave of absence to start Hedra, Michael was a PhD student at Stanford jointly advised by Jiajun Wu and Fei-Fei Li. Michael has published in top computer science conferences such as ICRA and CoRL, with a focus on building large-scale simulation platforms for computer vision and robotics. He has also made notable contributions to several open source projects (iGibson, OmniGibson). He’s a passionate cinephile, former thespian, and huge fan of Denis Villeneuve.

Alex Bergman (Chief Scientist) - Alex recently received his PhD from Stanford working with Gordon Wetzstein. Alex has made significant contributions to neural rendering research, resulting in publications at top machine learning and computer vision conferences such as NeurIPS and ICCV. He is especially interested in packaging the benefits of neural rendering technology in tools which are intuitive to use for creatives. Outside of work, Alex enjoys traveling, movies, and spending time outdoors.