Job Description
About
- 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.
Engineering
Video is the most powerful way humans tell stories. It always has been. But creating it today is still painfully hard. Fragmented tools, steep learning curves, and workflows that get in the way of the actual creative work. We're building Cardboard to change that.
As a founding AI engineer in our team, you'll own the agent harness end to end. That means figuring out why a model behaves differently when a prompt shifts by a sentence, digging through conversation histories for patterns, and building your own evals and datasets to actually know if things are improving.
We want someone who has shipped real AI systems in production, not demos, but things that held up. Someone who understands LLMs deeply enough to have opinions about them. If you've worked seriously with memory, that's a big plus.
You will
- Own the agent harness, from architecture to production.
- Understand model behavior at a deep level: prompts, versions, context, and why it all matters.
- Write and maintain your own evals, benchmarks, and datasets.
- Dig through conversation histories and turn what you find into product improvements.
- Solve these problems.
- Make something people love.
What you get
- Competitive salary and founding-team equity.
- Relocation to SF, including visa / immigration support.
- A spot in our hacker house, living and building alongside the team.
- Unlimited tokens. Use whatever you want, as much as you want.
- A healthy budget for tools, monitors, laptop, and anything you need to do your best work.
How to apply
Send us:
- Your resume / portfolio, plus any publications.
- One piece of work that you're proud of.
- Your favorite product and one sentence on why.
- A favorite research paper you came across and what stood out.
- Optional: if you'd like, record and send us a quick video : )
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Job Details
- Category
- Aerospace Engineering
- Employment Type
- Full Time
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Posted
- Compensation
- $120,000 - $200,000 per year
About Cardboard
Cardboard is an agentic video editor for growth/marketing teams and serious creators who need to ship videos consistently. Instead of agencies, long timelines, and infinite review cycles, teams give cardboard a footage + a goal (“3 variants”, “30s hook”, “testimonials”) to get a strong first cut in minutes on which they can iterate quickly. Multimodal LLMs can finally reason over footage, and WebGPU/WebCodecs make a real NLE possible in the browser. For the first time, an “AI director” inside a professional editor can be a reality. We have to build two hard things at once: a high-performance editor in the browser and an agentic editor that is reliable for production use cases. Most startups do one; incumbents can’t rebuild their stack without breaking everything. Saksham and Ishan met in school and have known each other since 15 years. Saksham was Co-founder/CTO of Iterate AI (backed by EF) and posts content on social media; Ishan has spent ~5yr building memory-heavy, performance-critical browser apps at HackerRank (S11) and deeply understands browsers. He has built Hotspoter (5M+ downloads) when he was 14. Together, we’re unusually suited to build the editor core others avoid. Video is becoming the default distribution channel, and the team that iterates fastest compounds attention. Cardboard becomes the default workspace for video production, the way Canva/Figma became the workspace for design - because it’s collaborative, fast, and does the tedious parts for you.
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