Senior / Staff Backend Engineer

Hedra is a pioneering generative media company backed by top investors at Index, A16Z, and Abstract Ventures. We're building Hedra Studio, a multimodal creation platform capable of control, emotion, and creative intelligence.

At the core of Hedra Studio is our Character-3 foundation model, the first omnimodal model in production. Character-3 jointly reasons across image, text, and audio for more intelligent video generation — it’s the next evolution of AI-driven content creation.

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. The Hedra team is fully in-person in SF/NY with a shared love of solving hard problems using whiteboards.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, build, and deploy the backend services that power our transformative products, including Create, Stylize, and Studio. You will work with web and video standards to power our suite of web-based video and audio creation / editing tools. You will also dive deep into video container formats and streaming protocols, such as MP4, MKV, HLS, and MP-DASH, and work with tools such as FFMPEG.

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.

• Experience developing scalable services using Python

• Experience developing RESTFUL APIs using frameworks such as FastAPI and Pydantic

• Familiarity with authentication / authorization, utilizing standards such as oauth2, OIDC, and JWT

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

• Experience writing unit and integration tests and working with CI/CD and dev-containers

• Experience writing scalable, async code and leveraging asyncio, generators, coroutines

• Experience building and scaling cloud-based infrastructure leveraging Kubernetes and EKS

• Familiarity with AWS IAM, IRSA, ALB/NLB, route53, S3, lambda

• Familiarity leveraging schema-registry, and serialization protocols such as avro, parquet, and JSON-schema

• Experience developing/scaling pipelines, event streaming/processing in AWS, using tools such as SQS or Kafka.

• 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).

• Experience architecting and implementing REST APIs for distributed systems.

• Experience with k8s, docker, especially in the context of deploying machine learning models on nvidia hardware.

• Familiarity with audio/video web standards and tools, such as Webcodecs, webRTC, HLS, MP-DASH, FFMPEG, MP4, and MKV a plus.

• At least 5 years of professional Python or Golang.

• 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

• Competitive compensation and equity.

• 401k.

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

• Gym access.

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.