Founding AI Engineer - YC AI Video Production Startup
Bounty Amount: €8,000 - €13,000
Company Name: Hera
Role Type: Full-time
Location: Berlin, Germany (On-site Strongly preferred) (Remote possible from New York, NY or San Francisco, CA)
Salary / Hourly Rate: €80,000 - €130,000 per year
Benefits: 0.75% - 1.50% Equity
Role Information
Role Overview: N/A
Responsibilities: Build and optimize LLM-powered code generation systems that produce professional animations following motion design principles such as easing, non-linear movement, and visual hierarchy, Design and implement agentic pipelines that chain multi-step reasoning and code generation to translate natural language prompts into editable animation code, Develop evaluation frameworks to measure animation code quality using both automated metrics and expert motion design feedback, Collaborate with motion designers and marketers to translate professional design knowledge into training data, prompts, and evaluation criteria, Design and implement fine-tuning pipelines to teach models domain-specific animation styles and brand guidelines, Create feedback loops between user preferences, expert input, and model performance to continuously improve generation quality, Research and prototype new approaches for controllable, style-consistent code generation for motion graphics
Qualifications: 3+ years of experience in AI engineering, LLM systems, or related engineering roles, Strong experience building LLM-powered systems, particularly code generation or programmatic output from natural language, Experience designing and implementing agentic pipelines (multi-step reasoning, tool calling, autonomous task execution), Ability to build production-ready ML/AI systems and pipelines, Experience working in fast-paced startup environments or shipping production software, Strong programming and problem-solving skills, NOT looking for computer vision, image recognition, or 3D generation backgrounds
Minimum Requirements: Proven experience working with or within a top high-growth startup or elite technology company (examples: top YC startups, Palantir, Stripe, Ramp, Notion, Figma, Scale AI, Anduril, etc.).,Strong programming ability in modern languages used for AI or backend development.,Experience working with machine learning systems or generative AI models.,Ability to operate independently and take ownership of technical projects.,Hands-on experience building LLM-powered code generation or agentic pipeline systems in production
Screening Questions: N/A
Company Information
About Company: N/A
Culture: N/A
Additional Information
Interview Process: Intro call with the founders, Technical discussion and system design conversation, Practical technical exercise or ML discussion, Final founder interview
Day to day: Building and improving generative AI models for animation creation, Developing evaluation pipelines for animation quality, Collaborating with motion designers to translate design knowledge into ML systems, Experimenting with new approaches for controllable generative media, Shipping AI features directly into the product
Team: This role works directly with the founders and engineering team.Hera operates as a small founding team, so engineers will have significant ownership over product and technical decisions.
Growth: As a founding engineer, this role offers the opportunity to shape the technical foundation of the company and help define the AI systems powering the product.Future growth could include Staff AI Engineer or Head of AI roles as the team expands.
Ideal Candidate Profile: Highly ambitious builder excited about founding-stage startups, Deep experience with LLMs and code generation, not CV/image/3D, Track record building agentic workflows and multi-step AI pipelines, Comfortable solving ambiguous technical challenges, Interested in working closely with founders to build a category-defining product, Motivated by ownership and impact
