Lead Engineer

Make Believe; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Make Believe is hiring a full-time engineer to build the platform behind our interactive video formats. You will own end-to-end features, from data models to UI, and work with founders and external partners to ship innovative AI-driven experiences.

We value fast iteration, clear communication, and hands-on curiosity about Video AI. You will help shape the architecture as we explore avatar, lip-sync, and real-time media tooling, with a lean in-house team and external collaborators.

Qualifications

• Comfortable working full-stack and owning a feature end to end.
• Thrive in a startup environment with high ambiguity and fast iteration.
• Product-minded: make decisions and prototype quickly.
• Motivated by impact and wants to shape the product.
• Clear communicator who can work with external partners and a small in-house team.
• Interested in Video AI and exploring edge technologies.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build the platform behind Make Believe's interactive video formats, from real-time avatar pipelines to narrative tooling.
• Own backend services, APIs, and orchestration.
• Integrate and evaluate fast-moving Video AI tooling and models.
• Contribute to real-time infrastructure for live listening, reasoning, and responses.
• Set directions, review external work, and absorb pieces in-house over time.
• Make product-level decisions and ship concrete features without waiting for a full spec.

Skills

Full-stack

Ownership

Startup mindset

Product-minded

Clear communicator

Tools

LiveKit

HeyGen

Job description

Make Believe builds interactive video experiences powered by AI: avatars, agents, and generative video stitched into formats people can actually talk to, play with, and learn from. We're creating a new category of entertainment and education where the screen talks back.

Our work spans several distinct formats, from AI personas and interactive games to branching narrative experiences, all built on a shared platform. We're a small, fast-moving team whose past work has shaped internet video, and we partner with outside studios and engineering shops to ship quickly while we build our core team in-house.

This is a full-time, in-house engineering hire, and the impact is exactly as broad as that sounds. You'll help architect the platform that powers every Make Believe format: the systems that turn AI models, avatars, voices, and agent logic into interactive video experiences that feel alive.

You'll work directly with the founders and product team, and alongside external engineering partners who help us move fast. The space is genuinely new and most of the tools and techniques here were invented in the last eighteen months, so we care less about whether you've already mastered them and more about whether you're the kind of engineer who runs toward problems no one has a playbook for yet.

What you'll do

• Architect and build the platform behind Make Believe's interactive video formats, from real-time avatar and agent pipelines to pre-rendered narrative tooling.
• Own backend services, APIs, and orchestration.
• Integrate and evaluate fast-moving Video AI tooling: generative video libraries, avatar and lip-sync models, voice, and real-time media.
• Contribute to our real-time infrastructure so experiences can listen, reason, and respond live.
• Stand up evals and feedback loops so we can measure quality and iterate on AI behavior with confidence rather than vibes.
• Collaborate with external engineering partners and agencies, setting technical direction, reviewing their work, and absorbing the right pieces in-house over time.
• Make product-level decisions: take an ambiguous idea, choose a direction, and ship something real without waiting for a finished spec.

Who you are

• Comfortable working full-stack and happy owning a feature end to end, from data model to UI.
• Thrive in a startup environment, so high ambiguity, fast iteration, shifting priorities, and a lot of ownership.
• Product-minded: you make decisions, prototype quickly, and use judgment to fill gaps rather than waiting to be told exactly what to build.
• Motivated by impact. You want your work to visibly shape the product and the company, not disappear into a backlog.
• Genuinely excited about Video AI and want to innovate at the edge of what's possible, not just maintain what already exists.
• A clear communicator who can work effectively alongside external partners and a small in-house team.

Nice to have (or eager to explore)

These are very new technologies and almost nobody has years of experience with them. Hands-on familiarity is a plus, but real curiosity and eagerness to dive in counts for just as much:

• Generative / avatar video: HeyGen, and similar avatar, lip-sync, and generative video libraries and models.
• Real-time media and agents: LiveKit (or comparable real-time/WebRTC stacks) and agent frameworks for building responsive, conversational experiences.
• Evals: building evaluation harnesses and quality loops for LLM- and AI-driven systems.
• Adjacent AI tooling: voice/TTS, video generation models, and the broader generative-media ecosystem.

As one of the founding members of our technical team, you'll have a rare amount of leverage: the architecture is still being drawn, the formats are still taking shape, and the technology is brand new for everyone. You'll help define how Make Believe builds interactive video - and grow with the team you'll help shape.

Logistics

• Remote, with a preference for US time-zone overlap.
• Full-time.
• Working directly with founders and external partners.