Founding Design Engineer
About the role
Founding Design Engineer role at Cardboard, a YC-funded startup building an in-browser video editor and AI-assisted storytelling tool. Founding team with emphasis on craft, frontend interactions, and rendering performance.
Responsibilities
- Build and ship the interactions, animations, micro-interactions, and core rendering engine work that powers Cardboard.
- Optimize memory usage when projects reference tens of gigs of source media through smart streaming, caching, and asset management across OPFS, Cache Storage, cache headers, and related browser primitives.
- Work across core product features like the editor timeline, end-to-end microsites, micro-apps, and polished elements across our marketing and blog.
- Build reusable components and push the quality bar for everything that touches the surface, while respecting the user's device constraints.
- Experiment with new interaction patterns, shaders, and creative techniques. Ship the ones that make the product feel more alive.
- Write great design.md files. Set interface guidelines for the team and our agents in the spirit of interfaces.rauno.me. Raise our accessibility standards.
- Wire up API endpoints when the work demands it.
- Solve these hard problems.
Qualifications
- You have deep knowledge of easing and timing. Ease-out, ease-in-out, linear: you know when and why. You have opinions about 80ms vs 300ms.
- You're fluent in GSAP, Framer Motion, and Three.js. You're comfortable with shaders, dither effects, and SVG animation performance.
- You're solid in WebGL and GLSL. You understand rendering pipelines from the inside, not just as an API.
- You're obsessed with frontend performance. You can profile browser performance bottlenecks and systematically optimize them, especially during extended editing sessions.
- Bonus: you're excited about WebGPU and where it's going.
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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