Senior Backend Engineer (Python, Go)

About Hedra

Hedra is a pioneering video foundation model company founded by former Stanford PhDs and backed by top investors at Index, A16Z Games, and Abstract Ventures. We are building a unified creation studio that empowers users to generate dialogue, audio, and video, effectively automating their digital presence. Our flagship product, Character-1, launched in late June and has already garnered national attention, attracting over 450,000 registered users and generating millions of videos. We raised 10 million dollars in our seed round to revolutionize content creation.

Job Summary

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 be responsible for building and deploying backend services and APIs to our Kubernetes infrastructure, writing secure, stable, and scalable Python code, interfacing with our ground-breaking foundation model, and integrating with SQS, Kafka, S3, and DynamoDB to implement event streaming/processing logic.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop scalable services using Python.
• Develop RESTful APIs using frameworks such as FastAPI and Pydantic.
• Work with authentication/authorization standards such as OAuth2, OIDC, and JWT.
• Work with relational and NoSQL datastores (such as DynamoDB).
• Write unit and integration tests and work with CI/CD and dev-containers.
• Write scalable, async code leveraging asyncio, generators, and coroutines.
• Build and scale cloud-based infrastructure leveraging Kubernetes and EKS.
• Familiarity with AWS IAM, IRSA, ALB/NLB, Route53, S3, Lambda.
• Leverage schema-registry and serialization protocols such as Avro, Parquet, and JSON-schema.
• Develop/scale pipelines, event streaming/processing in AWS, using tools such as SQS or Kafka.

Experience and Skills

• At least 5 years of professional experience with Python or Golang.
• 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.
• Startup experience is a must.

Personality Traits

• Self-motivated and independent — able to set accurate timelines for development and deliver on them.
• Low ego, high patience, strong communication skills.
• Mission-driven — we are building something fundamentally disruptive and this reflects deeply in our company DNA.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity.
• 401k.
• Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental).
• Gym access.

Location

This position is based in New York, NY, and requires in-person work.

Join us at Hedra to be part of a team of passionate engineers and top researchers building truly disruptive and novel technology.