Founding Software Engineer

Founding Engineer - AI Motion Design Platform

YC-backed · Berlin · Onsite · 80k-k + significant equity

The opportunity

We're partnered exclusively with a YC-backed startup in Berlin that's building the AI system behind professional motion graphics. Their product turns a simple text prompt into polished, broadcast-quality animated videos - the kind that used to require After Effects, a week of work, and a specialist motion designer.

They're already used by creators and video teams with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and growing fast. The product works today. The question now is: how good can they make it?

They're looking for a founding engineer to own that answer.

The role

This is a founding engineering hire. You'd own and evolve the core agentic AI pipeline - a multi-agent system (Director Designer Animator) that orchestrates LLMs, rendering logic, and design intelligence to produce studio-grade output from a single prompt.

Your job isn't to build features for a roadmap. It's to make the AI output so good that non-designers create videos they're genuinely proud of.

Day to day, that means working across the full stack - but the centre of gravity is the AI pipeline and backend systems that power it. You'd diagnose quality issues, design solutions, and ship them to production with minimal hand-holding. This is a role for someone who forms their own view on what needs building and then goes and builds it.

What you'd work on

• Enhancing and extending the agentic animation pipeline - prompt interpretation, layout decisions, animation sequencing, and output polish
• LLM engineering - prompt design, evaluation frameworks, failure mode analysis, and iteration loops
• Backend and infrastructure - pipeline orchestration, cloud architecture (AWS), and system reliability
• Frontend when needed - React/TypeScript UI work to close the loop between AI output and user experience

What they're looking for

• You've shipped LLM-powered products in production. You understand prompting, evals, and where models break down.
• Strong backend and infrastructure depth - you're comfortable with pipeline architecture, cloud services, and systems that need to be robust.
• You can operate under ambiguity. You don't wait for a spec; you figure out what matters and move.
• You care about the end user. You work backwards from "does this output look good?" not "is this technically elegant?"
• You're relentless. You keep pulling at a problem until the result is right.

Bonus points

• You've built agentic or multi-step AI workflows (tool use, orchestration, state management)
• Experience with web-based creative tools - design, video, audio, canvas/WebGL, or real-time rendering
• Early-stage startup experience - you're comfortable with shifting priorities and wearing multiple hats

Tech stack

React · Node.js · TypeScript · AWS

Details

• Compensation: 80,-, + significant equity
• Location: Berlin, fully onsite (5 days/week)
• Stage: Early-stage, YC-backed