Founding Product Engineer

Ponder; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding-team equity

Medical, dental and vision

Lunch and dinner

Job summary

Ponder is hiring founding engineers to own big parts of the product and ship weekly. You’ll work across the desktop app, the agent and the server, and talk to users directly to understand their needs.

We’re looking for someone who has shipped products in TypeScript and React, with backend experience in Node and PostgreSQL. Founding-team equity and a competitive cash base are offered along with medical, dental and vision coverage, lunch and dinner in our Flatiron office.

Qualifications

• Shipped products used by people, with TypeScript and React.
• Backend development experience with Node.js and PostgreSQL.
• Ability to plan experiments or features and ship independently.
• Strong product sense to balance current requests with future needs.
• Links to past work or projects are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own big parts of the product and ship them weekly across desktop app, agent and server.
• Talk to users directly to understand their needs and translate them into fixes.
• Collaborate with design and other engineers to deliver end-to-end solutions.

Skills

TypeScript

React

Node.js

PostgreSQL

APIs

Background jobs

Tools

FFmpeg

WebCodecs

WebGL

Electron

LLMs and agents

Job description

Hi, Timothy here, co-founder of Ponder. Ponder helps creators, filmmakers and marketers turn video ideas into finished videos as fast as possible, starting from raw footage and finding the story in it. It's built to hold up for people who make videos for a living, and it works with all the major editors: 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 and dinner.

About Ponder

Ponder is your junior editor, and the work stays yours.

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 real taste use.

Who we are

Tim Tan and I are filmmakers who learned to build software. 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 things.