Backend Engineer

Cardboard is an agentic video editor for growth/marketing teams and serious creators who need to ship videos consistently. Instead of agencies, long timelines, and infinite review cycles, teams give cardboard a footage + a goal (“3 variants”, “30s hook”, “testimonials”) to get a strong first cut in minutes on which they can iterate quickly.

Cardboard believes AI video creation should make creators faster without taking the creative control out of their hands.

Its editor brings generation, editing, and export into one place, and learns how each creator works along the way.

As Backend Engineer at Cardboard, you will own the systems behind exports, media processing, generation, and usage billing.

You will build reliable async pipelines, reduce compute costs, and make large video workflows efficient. The role requires strong reasoning about state, queues, workers, and production systems.

You will work with the co-founder and engineering lead as an individual contributor.

• Async processing pipelines. Build long-running jobs that recover cleanly and report progress clearly.
• Video asset sync. Move large files efficiently through compression, pre-processing, and selective sync.
• Codec and export workflows. Improve how video enters, leaves, and moves through the editor.
• Credits and usage billing. Charge accurately across retries and prevent duplicate billing.
• Compute cost controls. Find the largest transcoding, GPU, and generation costs, then reduce them.
• Production infrastructure. Handle the Kubernetes and DevOps work needed at the current scale.

• Owned changing production systems. You kept reliability high while product requirements moved quickly.
• Built stateful async workflows. You reasoned clearly about queues, retries, workers, and recovery.
• Shipped with TypeScript. You used it as a core backend language and can work comfortably in Python.
• Improved compute economics. You traced costly workloads and changed systems to reduce their unit cost.
• Worked in zero-to-one products. You owned decisions and shipped weekly with limited structure.
• Used coding agents with judgment. You checked generated code against system behavior and sound reasoning.
• Handled media pipelines. Experience with FFmpeg, codecs, transcodes, or GPU workloads will shorten ramp time.

• Own the outcome. Take production problems from unclear symptoms to reliable fixes.
• Explain your reasoning. Make tradeoffs legible through clear written and spoken communication.
• Ship every week. Break large systems into useful increments and learn from production quickly.
• Protect product quality. Treat reliability, fairness, and user-visible progress as product decisions.
• Watch the unit cost. Measure what each job consumes and design with compute economics in view.
• Use agents with judgment. Work heavily with Claude, then verify the code and the model behind it.
• Work together in HSR. Build in person while using relocation flexibility where agreed.

The base pay is upto ₹60L a year. Founding ESOPs range from 0.1% to 0.5%. You work with the co-founder and engineering lead, owning backend systems across processing and billing. The role gives you responsibility for the infrastructure behind a changing video product.