Research Engineer

About our work

Kino AI is building tools and training models to organize video. We serve top movie and TV studios, and we make editing more productive and enjoyable.

We're a deeply technical team from MIT, SpaceX, AWS and Citadel Securities. We're backed by Y Combinator, AI Grant, and many others.

Kino currently has more demand than it can handle. We need more engineers, deeper integration within current firms, and added capabilities. We're very excited about this next phase!

About your work

Kino is building a next generation video organizer and editor. You will work on Kino’s two-fold approach:

• Retrieval from a massive corpus of client video (visual features, dialogue, people, events)
• Generation of text descriptions, rough cuts, and fully-edited scenes from these retrieved moments

You will incorporate principles of fields that have been around for a very long time: information retrieval, computer vision, NLP, and filmmaking.

Our clients are top brands and media properties, whose footage is deeply important to them. These are exciting datasets to work with!

About your background

• 3+ years of relevant industry experience
• You have trained and evaluated models in the past:
• Are proficient in Python and have experience with Pytorch or JAX
• Strong experience with computer vision
• Comfort with large amounts of data (e.g., terabytes of video)
• Comfort with web development (you can quickly build interfaces to view and evaluate model output)
• Experience in CUDA programming is a plus
• Ability to rapidly iterate on ideas and honestly evaluate new approaches
• Experience with LLMs, LLM-based retrieval, and LLM evals is a plus
• Past experience with the OpenAPI/Anthropic/Gemini APIs is great
• Excited to embrace the Hamming question: Is this the most important thing to be working on right now?

About you

• You are fast - you maintain a high quality at a top speed, you communicate when things will be done and stick to those deadlines. If there's a slowdown or failed experiment, you'll let us know immediately.
• You ruthlessly prioritize - you work closely with the CEO and other engineers to prioritize what’s important and what can wait
• You are proactive - you anticipate problems before they arise, you know what questions you’ll be asked and have prepared responses before they’re asked, you predict what the company will need next and proactively outline what it is and the steps for how we’ll get there
• You have high degrees of ownership - you want a problem solved end-to-end and will do everything to make it happen. If there's a blocker outside of your domain, you'll push ahead anyway.
• You are curious - you are an elite analytical and conceptual problem solver, intentionally build and maintain relationships with your coworkers, love to learn about our unique industry, onboard quickly onto tools the team uses and constantly think about how we could be operating better

Logistics

• This is a full-time, in-person opportunity in San Francisco. We're big believers in in-person culture!
• We are open to sponsoring International candidates (e.g STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3)
• $160,000 - $250,000 a year
• Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area
• 0.75%-1.75% equity

What we offer

• Work alongside world class engineers and applied researchers
• Make your mark; this is a very new codebase heavy customer usage.
• Impact on a product that will change the entertainment industry
• Interact daily with some of the most important entertainment brands
• Unlimited PTO

If invited, this role requires an in-person work trial in San Francisco, as this is an in-person role. If this is not possible for you, please send an explanation. We are strong believers in an in-person culture!