Founding Product Engineer
Build Ponder end to end, from the timeline to the agent.
Hi, Timothy here, co-founder of Ponder. Ponder helps creators, filmmakers and marketers turn video ideas into finished videos as fast as possible. It's built for people who make videos for a living, and it works with all the major NLEs: Premiere, DaVinci, Final Cut and CapCut.
We're hiring founding engineers who want to own big parts of the product and ship them every week.
The job
A filmmaker or creator tells us what's slowing them down, and you put the fix in their hands. Most weeks you'll work across the desktop app, the agent and the server, and talk to users yourself.
What you'll work on
- Timeline, playback, scrubbing and rendering that keep up with hours of 4K footage.
- The agent's tools and context, so Ponder finds the story in footage and makes edits people keep.
- Handoff to the editors people already use: Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut and CapCut.
- The media pipeline that brings terabytes of footage in on a laptop.
- Whatever our users are stuck on this week.
What we need from you
- You've shipped products people use in TypeScript and React, and you're comfortable on the backend: Node, Postgres, APIs, background jobs.
- You can plan an experiment or a feature and carry it to shipped on your own.
- Product sense. You can weigh what users ask for today against what they'll need in a few months.
- Things you've built for fun. Send the links.
Nice to have
- Video, audio or graphics work: FFmpeg, WebCodecs, WebGL, Electron.
- You've built with LLMs and agents.
- You edit video yourself, or you've built creative tools.
Details
- Full time, in person at our office in Flatiron, Manhattan.
- $120K–$150K base depending on experience, plus founding-team equity.
- Medical, dental and vision, plus lunch.
About Ponder
Ponder is your assistant video editor.
There are a lot of AI video tools now, and most of what comes out of them is slop. We want Ponder to be the one people with taste use.
Who we are
Tim Tan and I were filmmakers and creators before we became founders. I went to NYU film school and started a production company at 19. By 22 I'd built and sold a virtual production studio, then went to NYU ITP to work on AI for creative tools. Tim studied computer science at Georgia Tech and was the most popular college vlogger on YouTube while he was there. He turned down Amazon to work at YC startups.
The rest of the team is engineers from Vercel, Amazon and YC startups, an exited founder, a designer and a filmmaker, all in one office in Flatiron. Everyone here makes cool things.
How to apply
Fill out the short form. It asks for links to things you've built and the hardest problem you've solved. Skip the cover letter.