Principal Backend Engineer

Principal Backend Engineer

About Kaiber

At Kaiber, our mission is to empower humans with generative creative tools and discover what it means for humans and machines to make art together.

Our product, Kaiber Labs is a generative AI creative suite that enables creatives to do text2image, text2video, image2video, and video2video with much more on the way.

We also run Kaiber studio - a creative AI research studio. Our studio defines the next frontier of self expression with cutting edge technology and high visibility partnerships such as Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, Kid Cudi, and Grimes.

Our customers use Kaiber to:

Create music videos

Animate album art covers

Make concert visuals

Craft full-length films

Repurpose content with an imaginative twist

Founding Team

Kaiber was founded byVictor Wang (Goodwin, Inkly (YC)),Eric Gao (Facebook, Banner (YC)),Jacky Lu (Stripe),Christine Zuniga (Tableau, MuleSoft), andEde Schweizer (Amazon, Apple, Google).

We bootstrapped to $5M ARR and recently raised a $8M seed round from EQT Ventures so you can rest easy knowing we’re ready to invest in you.

We are a remote/hybrid company with a distributed workforce in multiple locations.

Job Responsibilities

The responsibility of this role is an equal mix of Backend + DevOps. As a key player in our lean, elite engineering team (~ 12 engineers), expect that you will be spending >50% of time coding in this role.

You will be responsible for, and own, most (if not all) of our backend systems.

People think about you as both “the Uber Tech Lead for all of Kaiber’s backend” and “a truly exceptional IC with deep coding contribution”.

Concretely, you will:

• Design and implement backend components to power user-facing features and/or AI models. (Backend)
• Design and simplify backend business logic to reduce operational burden and system complexity, and automate operational tasks. (Backend + DevOps)
• Build and operate event-based systems (e.g. Kafka). (Backend)
• Build and operate batch processing systems (e.g. Spark). (Backend)
• Dramatically improve engineering productivity by improving CI/CD pipelines. (DevOps)
• Dramatically improve site reliability by setting up monitoring and alerting across the stack, etc. (DevOps)
• Setup and operate Kubernetes clusters (DevOps).
• As an awesome team lead, you will:
• Exhibit great technical judgements in influencing the team to make the right technical decisions. These include: system architecture, code structure, best practices, and directions to solve a complex problem, etc.
• Representing the engineering department, collaborate with cross-functional teams (design, marketing, etc) to drive business-critical projects.
• Mentor and guide team members.
• Support Kaiber’s culture. Foster a fun and fulfilling work environment; actively contribute to team health and wellbeing.

If you're passionate about pushing the boundaries of making arts with generative AI, with cutting-edge technologies, and want to make a significant impact in a small, fast-paced team, we'd love to hear from you!

Minimum Qualifications

• 9+ years of relevant experience
• Write high-quality code, fast(you will be spending >50% of time in coding in this role) .
• 3 years of experience inNode.js development.
• Experience in designing and implementing extensive experience in building elegant backend systems — reliable, low-maintenance, scalable, and extensible.
• Experience in operating Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, observability platforms.
• Care deeply about the quality of the software / systems you build. You have an artisan mentality and are always looking to improve your craft. At the same time you are able to strike the right balance between idealism and pragmatism.

PreferredQualifications

• 3 years of experience in event-based systems (e.g. Kafka, AWS SQS).
• 1 years of experience batch processing systems (e.g. Spark).
• Experience in developing ML systems, preferrably GenAI systems (LLM, image generation, or video generation systems) .
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field

Tech Stack We Use

MERN: MongoDB,Express.js , React,Node.js

Cloudflare R2

Cloud VM clusters with NVIDIA GPUs. They serve our ML models.

Serverless / PaaS providers with NVIDIA GPUs. They serve our ML models.

GenAI tools: ComfyUI, A1111, etc

iOS, Android: Swift, Kotlin

Salary Range:

$195,000 - $252,000 per year, DOE and location

This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, such as candidate’s experience, knowledge, skills and abilities, as well as internal equity among our team. Additional benefits for this role may include: equity, company bonus opportunities; medical, dental, and vision benefits; unlimited PTO; and supplemental wellness benefits.

Equal Opportunity Employer