Founding Engineer - AI Motion Design Platform
YC-backed · Berlin · Onsite · €80k-€120k + significant equity
The opportunity
We're partnered exclusively with a YC-backed startup in Berlin that's building the AI system behind professional motion graphics. Their product turns a simple text prompt into polished, broadcast-quality animated videos - the kind that used to require After Effects, a week of work, and a specialist motion designer.
They're already used by creators and video teams with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and growing fast. The product works today. The question now is: how good can they make it?
They're looking for a founding engineer to own that answer.
The role
This is a founding engineering hire. You'd own and evolve the core agentic AI pipeline - a multi-agent system (Director → Designer → Animator) that orchestrates LLMs, rendering logic, and design intelligence to produce studio-grade output from a single prompt.
Your job isn't to build features for a roadmap. It's to make the AI output so good that non-designers create videos they're genuinely proud of.
Day to day, that means working across the full stack - but the centre of gravity is the AI pipeline and backend systems that power it. You'd diagnose quality issues, design solutions, and ship them to production with minimal hand-holding. This is a role for someone who forms their own view on what needs building and then goes and builds it.
What you'd work on
- Enhancing and extending the agentic animation pipeline - prompt interpretation, layout decisions, animation sequencing, and output polish
- LLM engineering - prompt design, evaluation frameworks, failure mode analysis, and iteration loops
- Backend and infrastructure - pipeline orchestration, cloud architecture (AWS), and system reliability
- Frontend when needed - React/TypeScript UI work to close the loop between AI output and user experience
What they're looking for
- You've shipped LLM-powered products in production. You understand prompting, evals, and where models break down.
- Strong backend and infrastructure depth - you're comfortable with pipeline architecture, cloud services, and systems that need to be robust.
- You can operate under ambiguity. You don't wait for a spec; you figure out what matters and move.
- You care about the end user. You work backwards from "does this output look good?" not "is this technically elegant?"
- You're relentless. You keep pulling at a problem until the result is right.
Bonus points
- You've built agentic or multi-step AI workflows (tool use, orchestration, state management)
- Experience with web-based creative tools - design, video, audio, canvas/WebGL, or real-time rendering
- Early-stage startup experience - you're comfortable with shifting priorities and wearing multiple hats
Tech stack
React · Node.js · TypeScript · AWS
Details
- Compensation: €80,000-€120,000 + significant equity
- Location: Berlin, fully onsite (5 days/week)
- Stage: Early-stage, YC-backed
