Founding Engineer
About this role
We are looking for a Founding Engineer with 0-5 years of experience to join a 3-person team building the first AI-native collaborative video editor. You'll help scale a product already beloved by major Hollywood studios into a consumer launch, pushing the browser to its absolute limits with professional video workloads and agentic editing workflows.
What will you be doing?
Building and hardening a desktop-class video editor in the browser that handles 10+ hours of daily professional use without crashing
Developing AI agents that understand video editing, brand consistency, and motion graphics
Performance engineering to beat traditional editors like Adobe Premiere on playback, scrubbing, and responsiveness
Training and deploying small ML models (classifiers, vision-language models) for video understanding tasks
Talking to customers and users daily, dog-fooding the product, and shipping features end-to-end
Company at a glance
Kino AI is a startup backed by Y Combinator and AI Grant, led by Luke Igel (MIT ’22) formerly at NASA JPL, SpaceX, Slack, CSM, and KoKo; the founding team includes members from MIT, SpaceX, and NASA.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Culture & values
The company aims to make editing more productive and enjoyable.
The team expresses enthusiasm about the next phase, indicating a growth-oriented mindset.
Team members come from MIT, SpaceX, and NASA.
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