Backend Engineer

About the Position

Backend Engineer

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.

About the Role

Cardboard runs a real video editor in the browser, backed by a serious cloud media pipeline and an AI agent that actually understands footage. We’re hiring a Fullstack Engineer who can own a feature from the pixel a user clicks all the way down to the service that renders it. You move up and down the stack without flinching, and you ship things that work.

You’ll be working alongside a team of engineers who all care deeply about craft, including the founders. You like owning problems end to end, and you’d rather ship something great this week than something perfect next quarter.

Responsibilities

• Own backend systems for exports, proxies, media preprocessing, analysis, and agent-powered editing.
• Maintain the APIs and state contracts between the browser, workers, storage, and database.
• Improve long-running media workflows: uploads, exports, processing jobs, progress, and recovery.
• Keep the backend simple enough to operate as projects, files, and usage grow.
• Solve these hard problems.

Requirements

• Experience with backend systems
• Proficiency with APIs and state contracts
• Knowledge of media workflows
• Experience with TypeScript, Go, Rust, or Python
• Bonus: deep FFmpeg or GStreamer experience, or codec internals knowledge across formats like ProRes, H.264/H.265, BRAW, R3D, DNx, and others.

We Offer

• Competitive salary and founding-team equity.
• Unlimited tokens across every AI model. Use whatever you want, as much as you want.
• A healthy budget for AI tools and any peripherals you need to do your best work.

About the Company

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.