Software Engineer, Backend

Description

The company is an AI video business that makes creating video much easier. The team works on some of the hardest creative and technical problems in generative media.

The work covers building multimodal agents that turn creative direction into edits, rendering engines that stack video and graphics layers, and generative video models trained in-house that produce new media when needed.

Captions is the company's creative workspace for generating, editing, and designing video. Its underlying technology is also offered more widely: Tesseract gives any AI agent video-editing abilities, and developers can use the company's models in their own products through APIs.

Most roles require working in person at the NYC headquarters in Union Square.

Backend work here spans product, platform, and machine learning. The team builds the systems, services, APIs, and ML pipelines behind every product surface.

You will own critical backend systems from start to finish, working closely with product, design, client, and AI teams to turn ambitious ideas into reliable, scalable production systems. The role suits engineers who like hard technical problems and want to stay close to product and user outcomes.

The company does not use hierarchical titles or levels, but it is currently hiring engineers who have worked at senior or staff+ scope.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own end-to-end backend systems, including services, APIs, data pipelines, and the infrastructure behind the products
• Solve hard problems in distributed systems, scaling, concurrency, and performance
• Deploy, serve, and scale large generative AI models in production, combining internal research with external capabilities to enable new product experiences
• Instrument and experiment in production, then iterate to keep improving system and product quality
• Design and run core platform infrastructure, including third-party provider integrations, storage, security, and internal APIs

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional industry experience
• A record of shipping high-impact systems or products to production
• Strong problem-solving fundamentals and the ability to keep learning
• Good engineering judgment, balanced with practicality and time management
• Able to work effectively in an extremely fast-paced environment and to scope and deliver projects end to end
• Nice to have: extensive work with LLMs and generative media models, and a clear view of where the technology is heading
• Nice to have: grounded and collaborative, and willing to do whatever it takes for the team to win

Conditions

Most roles require in-person work at the NYC headquarters in Union Square

Benefits apply to full-time employees only

Equal-opportunity boilerplate: not included in this text

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
• 401K with employer match
• Commuter benefits
• Catered lunch multiple days per week
• Dinner stipend every night when working late
• Grubhub subscription
• Health and wellness perks
• Multiple team offsites per year and monthly team events
• Generous PTO policy