Backend Engineer
About the role
Backend Engineer role at Cardboard, a YC-backed video storytelling/editor startup. Full-stack engineering position focused on building and maintaining backend systems for a browser-based video editor, with emphasis on exports, media pipelines, and agent-powered editing.
Responsibilities
- Own backend systems for exports, proxies, media preprocessing, analysis, and agent-powered editing.
- Maintain the APIs and state contracts between the browser, workers, storage, and database.
- Improve long-running media workflows: uploads, exports, processing jobs, progress, and recovery.
- Keep the backend simple enough to operate as projects, files, and usage grow.
- Solve hard problems related to the product as described by the team.
Qualifications
- You've owned production backend systems and kept them healthy as the product changed.
- You think clearly about state, queues, workers, files, and the contracts between them.
- You can turn product goals like faster exports or instant-feeling uploads into a practical backend plan.
- You care about media: formats, codecs, model output, processing time, and the final quality users see.
- You're language-flexible. TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python: you'll use whatever fits the problem.
- Bonus: deep FFmpeg or GStreamer experience, or codec internals knowledge across formats like ProRes, H.264/H.265, BRAW, R3D, DNx, and others.
Skills
Benefits
- Competitive salary and founding-team equity.
- Unlimited tokens across every AI model. Use whatever you want, as much as you want.
- A healthy budget for AI tools and any peripherals you need to do your best work.
About Cardboard
Agentic video editor
Cardboard is an agentic video editor for growth/marketing teams and serious creators who need to ship videos consistently. Instead of agencies, long timelines, and infinite review cycles, teams give cardboard a footage + a goal (“3 variants”, “30s hook”, “testimonials”) to get a strong first cut in minutes on which they can iterate quickly. Multimodal LLMs can finally reason over footage, and WebGPU/WebCodecs make a real NLE possible in the browser. For the first time, an “AI director” inside a professional editor can be a reality. We have to build two hard things at once: a high-performance editor in the browser and an agentic editor that is reliable for production use cases. Most startups do one; incumbents can’t rebuild their stack without breaking everything. Saksham and Ishan met in school and have known each other since 15 years. Saksham was Co-founder/CTO of Iterate AI (backed by EF) and posts content on social media; Ishan has spent ~5yr building memory-heavy, performance-critical browser apps at HackerRank (S11) and deeply understands browsers. He has built Hotspoter (5M+ downloads) when he was 14. Together, we’re unusually suited to build the editor core others avoid. Video is becoming the default distribution channel, and the team that iterates fastest compounds attention. Cardboard becomes the default workspace for video production, the way Canva/Figma became the workspace for design - because it’s collaborative, fast, and does the tedious parts for you.
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