Software Engineer, Backend (8+ Years Of Experience)

Backend Team Member

Captions is the leading AI video company—our mission is to empower anyone, anywhere to tell their stories through video. Over 10 million creators and businesses have used Captions to simplify video creation with truly novel and groundbreaking AI capabilities.

We are a rapidly growing team of ambitious, experienced, and devoted engineers, researchers, designers, marketers, and operators based in NYC. As an early member of our team, you'll have an opportunity to have an outsized impact on our products and our company's culture.

Our Technology

Mirage Announcement our proprietary omni-modal foundation model

Seeing Voices (technical paper) generating A-roll video from audio with Mirage

Mirage Studio for generating expressive videos at scale

Captions: For Talking Videos available in the iOS app store

Press Coverage

Lenny's Podcast: Interview with Gaurav Misra (CEO)

Latest Fundraise: Series C Announcement

The Information: 50 Most Promising Startups

Fast Company: Next Big Things in Tech

Business Insider: 34 Most Promising AI Startups

TIME: The Best Inventions of 2024

Our Investors

We're very fortunate to have some the best investors and entrepreneurs backing us, including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Lenny Rachitsky, Antoine Martin, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, SVAngel, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, Chapter One, and more.

Please note that all of our roles will require you to be in-person at our NYC HQ (located in Union Square)

We do not work with third-party recruiting agencies, please do not contact us

About the Role

As a member of our Backend Team, you will play a critical role in architecting, building, and evolving the foundational infrastructure that supports our global user base. You'll be involved in high-impact engineering projects—designing and operating large-scale, fault-tolerant systems that serve millions of users in real-time. This role is less about configuring or making small tweaks to existing systems, and more creating and optimizing the core services and platforms our products run on, ensuring the entire organization can innovate quickly and reliably. This person will have an opportunity to help creators around the world tell their stories with audio, video, and beyond.

Key Responsibilities

• Solve Complex Technical Challenges: You will design, implement, and optimize large-scale distributed systems capable of handling enormous throughput and concurrency.
• Drive Product Infrastructure Forward: You'll collaborate closely with product teams to make sure our platform is not just operationally sound, but also enables rapid feature development and deployment across multiple surfaces (mobile, web, and beyond).
• Shape Next-Generation Video and AI Platforms: You'll have visibility into our advanced video processing workflows and AI research efforts, contributing to the core building blocks that make these cutting-edge initiatives possible.
• Influence Technical Direction: You'll bring new ideas and approaches to the table, stay ahead of industry trends, and help guide our platform roadmap and best practices.
• Drive Platform Improvements: Continuously refine our existing platform, identify new technologies or methodologies that can enhance our infrastructure, and guide their adoption within the organization.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Partner with cross-functional teams (product, web, mobile, ML research) to address scale, performance, and security challenges.

Requirements

• 8+ years of industry experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in a production environment.
• Strong computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, concurrency, etc.) and proficiency in modern programming languages (e.g., Python, C++, Java, Rust).
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructures (GCP, AWS, Azure, or others) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a proven track record of delivering high-quality, scalable solutions.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
• 401K with employer match
• Commuter Benefits
• Catered lunch multiple days per week
• Dinner stipend every night if you're working late and want a bite!
• Doordash DashPass subscription
• Health & Wellness Perks (Talkspace, Kindbody, One Medical subscription, HealthAdvocate, Teladoc)
• Multiple team offsites per year with team events every month
• Generous PTO policy

Captions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Please note benefits apply to full time employees only.