Principal Software Engineer

Captions is the leading AI video company—our mission is to empower anyone, anywhere to tell their stories through video. Over 10 million creators and businesses have used Captions to simplify video creation with truly novel and groundbreaking AI capabilities.

We are a rapidly growing team of ambitious, experienced, and devoted engineers, researchers, designers, marketers, and operators based in NYC. As an early member of our team, you’ll have an outsized impact on our products and our company's culture.

Our Technology

Mirage Announcement our proprietary omni-modal foundation model

Seeing Voices (technical paper) generating A-roll video from audio with Mirage

Mirage Studio for generating expressive videos at scale

"Captions: For Talking Videos” available in the iOS app store

Press Coverage

Lenny’s Podcast: Interview with Gaurav Misra (CEO)

Latest Fundraise: Series C Announcement

The Information: 50 Most Promising Startups

Fast Company: Next Big Things in Tech

Business Insider: 34 most promising AI startups

TIME: The Best Inventions of 2024

Our Investors

We’re very fortunate to have some the best investors and entrepreneurs backing us, including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Lenny Rachitsky, Antoine Martin, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, SVAngel, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, Chapter One, and more.

** Please note that all of our roles will require you to be in-person at our NYC HQ (located in Union Square)

We do not work with third-party recruiting agencies, please do not contact us**

About the role:

Note: we don’t promote hierarchical titles or levels internally, “Principal Engineer” is for external clarity—we’re looking for a highly experienced engineer who can solve some of our hardest technical challenges, shape architectural direction, and provide technical leadership. 

As a technical lead, you will architect and drive platform-wide initiatives that push the boundaries of distributed systems, and you will solve complex technical challenges at massive scale. Your work will ensure our software engineering organization can innovate quickly and reliably, ultimately helping creators around the world tell their stories through video.

Key Responsibilities:

• Solve Complex Technical Challenges: Design, implement, and optimize large-scale distributed systems capable of handling massive throughput and concurrency. Own critical backend services end-to-end, ensuring they meet high standards of performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency.

• Drive Product Infrastructure Forward: Collaborate with product teams to build systems and services that are operationally sound while also enabling rapid feature development and deployment across iOS, Android, and Web platforms.

• Drive Platform Improvements: Continuously refine our existing systems, and identify new technologies or methodologies that can enhance our infrastructure,

• Influence Technical Direction: You’ll bring fresh ideas to the table, mentor other engineers, and balance short-term needs with longer-term architectural vision—ensuring we can scale effectively as our user base grows.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of industry experience designing, building, and operating highly scalable distributed systems.

• Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, concurrency) and strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language (Python, C++, Java, Rust, etc.).

• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructures (GCP, AWS, Azure, or similar) and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes).

• Proven track record of delivering high-quality, scalable solutions to production, with an emphasis on performance and fault tolerance.

• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, with the ability to mentor others, navigate ambiguity, and tackle open-ended technical challenges.

Benefits:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans

• 401K with employer match

• Commuter Benefits

• Catered lunch multiple days per week

• Dinner stipend every night if you're working late and want a bite!

• Doordash DashPass subscription

• Health & Wellness Perks (Talkspace, Kindbody, One Medical subscription, HealthAdvocate, Teladoc)

• Multiple team offsites per year with team events every month

• Generous PTO policy

Captions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Please note benefits apply to full time employees only.