Founding Engineer, Systems & Infrastructure

Join Hire Hangar and work with fast-growing global companies while building a long-term career. Job Title: Founding Engineer, Systems & Infrastructure Location | On-Site — San Francisco, CA Time Zone | PST Role Overview: We are seeking a Founding Engineer to join the technical core of a fast-moving AI video infrastructure startup. The company's first product turns prompts and documents into whiteboard-style explainer videos in seconds, with a broader mission of making video generation fast, cheap, and programmable enough for AI to use anywhere it currently uses text. As a founding team member, you will focus on the low-level technical systems that determine speed, efficiency, and reliability — profiling real bottlenecks and designing clean solutions around complex internals. This role is built for someone who thinks naturally in terms of resource efficiency and enjoys solving hard technical problems most people never see. Key Responsibilities: Improve efficiency, speed, and reliability across core technical workflows Debug performance issues across application code, media processing, and infrastructure Build internal benchmarking and regression-testing tools Optimize resource usage: concurrency, caching, batching, and scheduling Create simple, well-designed interfaces around complex technical systems Collaborate closely with the product team without sacrificing technical depth Required Qualifications:

• Strong fundamentals in systems engineering — latency, throughput, memory, CPU/GPU, I/O
• Track record of improving performance in production environments
• Proficiency in C++ or a comparable low-level language, plus backend engineering skills
• Rigorous approach to measuring before optimizing
• Comfortable using AI tools to move faster, while independently defining and solving problems
• Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CA

• Background in robotics, embedded systems, or electronics engineering
• Comfort operating below the product surface, in less visible technical layers
• History of specific, measurable performance improvements shipped to production

• C++ or similar low-level languages
• Backend/API frameworks and databases
• Cloud infrastructure and deployment tooling
• AI-assisted development tools