Member of Technical Staff, GPU Optimization

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 an expert in making AI models run fast—really fast—you live at the intersection of CUDA, PyTorch, and generative models, and get excited by the idea of squeezing every last bit of performance out of modern GPUs. You will have the opportunity to turn our cutting-edge video generation research into scalable, production-grade systems. From designing custom CUDA or Triton kernels to profiling distributed inference pipelines, you'll work across the full stack to make sure our models train and serve at peak performance.

Key Responsibilities

• Optimize model training and inference pipelines, including data loading, preprocessing, checkpointing, and deployment, for throughput, latency, and memory efficiency on NVIDIA GPUs

• Design, implement, and benchmark custom CUDA and Triton kernels for performance-critical operations

• Integrate low-level optimizations into PyTorch-based codebases, including custom ops, low-precision formats, and TorchInductor passes

• Profile and debug the entire stack—from kernel launches to multi-GPU I/O paths—using Nsight, nvprof, PyTorch Profiler, and custom tools

• Work closely with researchers to co-design model architectures that are hardware-friendly and maintain state-of-the-art quality

• Stay on the cutting edge of GPU and compiler tech (e.g., Hopper features, CUDA Graphs, Triton, FlashAttention, and more) and evaluate their impact

• Collaborate with infrastructure and backend teams to improve cluster orchestration, scaling strategies, and observability for large experiments

• Provide clear, data-driven insights and trade-offs between performance, quality, and cost

• Contribute to a culture of fast iteration, thoughtful profiling, and performance-centric design

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands‑on experience writing and optimizing CUDA kernels in C/C++, Triton, or related technologies for production ML workloads

• Deep understanding of GPU architecture: memory hierarchies, warp scheduling, tensor cores, register pressure, and occupancy tuning

• Proven track record profiling and accelerating large‑scale training and inference jobs (e.g., mixed precision, kernel fusion, custom collectives)

• Strong Python skills and familiarity with PyTorch internals, TorchScript, and distributed data‑parallel training

• Comfort working in Linux environments with modern CI/CD, containerization, and cluster managers such as Kubernetes

• Ability to translate research goals into performant code, balancing numerical fidelity with hardware limits

• Bachelor’s or higher in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

About the Team

You’ll work directly alongside our research and engineering teams in our NYC office. We’ve intentionally built a culture where technical innovation and research excellence are highly valued. Your success will be measured by your contributions to improving our models and advancing the field, not by your ability to navigate politics. We’re a team that loves diving deep into complex technical problems and emerging with practical breakthroughs.

Our Team Values

• Open technical discussions and collaboration

• Rapid iteration and practical solutions

• Deep technical expertise and continuous learning

• Direct impact on research and product outcomes

What Sets Us Apart

• Opportunity to advance the state‑of‑the‑art in multimodal video generation

• Direct impact on products used by millions of creators

• Access to massive compute resources and diverse, large‑scale datasets

• Environment that values both research excellence and practical impact

• Ability to validate research through direct product feedback

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.