Software Engineer, Distributed Systems (7+ years of experience)

Captions is the leading video AI company, building the future of video creation. Over 10 million creators and businesses have used Captions to create videos for social media, marketing, sales, and more. We're on a mission to serve the next billion.

We are a rapidly growing team of ambitious, experienced, and devoted engineers, researchers, designers, marketers, and operators based in NYC. You'll join an early team and have an outsized impact on the product and the company's culture.

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

Check out our latest financing milestone and some other coverage:

The Information: 50 Most Promising Startups

Fast Company: Next Big Things in Tech

The New York Times: When A.I. Bridged a Language Gap, They Fell in Love

Business Insider: 34 most promising AI startups

Time: The Best Inventions of 2024

** 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 Team

Our Backend / Platform Engineering team is the backbone of our company’s innovation engine and core product infrastructure—responsible for building and scaling the large-scale systems and services that power every consumer-facing product across iOS, Android, and Web platforms. This team also develops sophisticated video processing pipelines that handle massive volumes of content, and the AI infrastructure that enables our research team to build, train, and serve large video generation models. 

About the Role

As a member of our Backend / Platform Engineering 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.

In this role, you will: 

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 7+ 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 and flexible WFH days

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.