Senior / Staff Full-Stack Engineer

About Hedra:

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.

Summary:

As a Senior Full-Stack Engineer, you will design, build, and deploy the frontend and backend services that power our transformative products. 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.

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, webRTC, HLS, MP-DASH, FFMPEG, MP4, and MKV.
• 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).

Nice-To-Have Experience:

• Experience developing scalable services using Python or Golang.
• Familiarity with authentication / authorization such as oauth2 and OIDC
• 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 WASM, websockets, IndexedDB, promises, generators, and coroutines.
• Experience building and scaling cloud-based infrastructure leveraging Kubernetes and EKS.
• Experience developing/scaling pipelines, event streaming/processing in AWS, using tools such as SQS or Kafka.
• 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.

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)
• Lunch and snacks at the office

We encourage you to apply even if you don't fully meet all the listed requirements; we value potential and diverse perspectives, and your unique skills could be a great asset to our team.