Founding Full-Stack Software Engineer (Video, Streaming, Ownership Infrastructure)

Founding Full-Stack Software Engineer

• Video, Streaming, Ownership Infrastructure
• Remote (Global) | Equity: 2–3% | Senior Technical Leadership Path

About Sinima

Sinima is the system that rebuilds Hollywood from the inside out by returning ownership, control, and revenue to the creators who actually make it exist.

We are an experienced, all-female executive team—operators, builders, and mothers—who have spent our careers inside the existing media and technology ecosystem. We understand where it works, where it fails, and whom it leaves behind. We are not iterating on that system. We are replacing its foundation with something more durable, more equitable, and more aligned with how creative work is actually made.

We are pre-revenue and pre-funding, by design. We have chosen to build deliberately and without external pressure so that the system is structurally sound before it scales. The platform is live in beta, creators are onboarding, and core hosting and portfolio workflows are functioning end-to-end. We are preparing to launch two large-scale proprietary products for a public launch in August 2026.

The Role

We are looking for a Founding Full-Stack Software Engineer with deep experience in video platforms, streaming systems, and backend architecture.

This is a senior, hands-on role with real ownership. You will take responsibility for how Sinima evolves from a working beta into a platform that can support creators at scale—without inheriting the inefficiencies of legacy media infrastructure.

You will operate across the full system, shaping APIs, video infrastructure, hosting, intellectual property systems, payments, AI/ML layers, and frontend performance. This role requires judgment. It is not about speed or volume. It is about building systems that are correct, durable, and coherent over time.

Core Technical Responsibilities

You will take ownership of the system end-to-end, with responsibility across architecture, infrastructure, and product execution:

• Design and evolve an API-first backend architecture (REST and/or GraphQL), including authentication, authorization, and creator-controlled asset permissioning
• Build and maintain scalable systems for media metadata, indexing, and retrieval, with clear attention to performance, caching, and reliability
• Own the video pipeline from ingestion through playback, including upload handling, transcoding workflows, adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/DASH), and cross-device playback performance
• Define and optimize storage and CDN strategies, balancing cost, latency, and global delivery performance
• Architect creator-owned hosting infrastructure, ensuring assets are durable, portable, and governed by ownership-based access control
• Build the foundation for intellectual property systems, including ownership tracking, contributor attribution, and direct linkage between rights and revenue participation
• Enable secure asset exchange across collaborators, buyers, and audiences, with auditability and long-term integrity of access
• Design and maintain Stripe-based monetization systems, including subscriptions, transactions, and payouts via Stripe Connect
• Build internal systems for earnings tracking, payout logic, and financial transparency, ensuring financial flows are correct, idempotent, and auditable
• Develop an AI-native processing layer, including pipelines for transcription, tagging, metadata generation, and AI-assisted production workflows
• Implement multi-provider AI orchestration, including routing, fallback strategies, and cost-aware usage controls
• Build and operate asynchronous job systems for media processing and AI workloads, ensuring reliability under load
• Support a project-based collaboration layer with multi-user access, role-based permissions, and attribution tied to creative output
• Build and maintain high-performance frontend systems, including media-heavy workflows and video playback integration
• Establish observability across the system, including logging, metrics, and tracing, and make pragmatic decisions about system boundaries as the platform evolves

Technical Environment

You will be working within a modern, production-ready environment built on React and TypeScript on the frontend, and PostgreSQL with strict row-level security on the backend. The system uses a serverless edge function architecture for compute, Mux for video ingestion and playback, Stripe for payments and payouts, and a multi-provider approach to AI integrations.

The architecture is API-first, private by default at the data layer, and designed to remain operable and performant with a small, senior team. External services are used where they improve reliability and speed, and infrastructure decisions are made with careful attention to cost across compute, storage, and delivery.

What You Bring

You have experience building or scaling video hosting, streaming, or media platforms and understand the systems that make them work. You are familiar with encoding pipelines, playback systems, and CDN delivery, and have designed backend systems where latency, throughput, and cost are real constraints.

You have worked with Stripe or comparable payment systems in production, ideally including Connect and payout flows. You have experience integrating AI or ML systems into real-world products and understand the implications of inference, cost, and system design.

You are disciplined in how you build. You are comfortable operating in low-structure environments, do not depend on large teams to be effective, and care about systems being correct, not just functional.

How We Build

We operate as a small, senior, highly accountable team. We use AI deliberately where it reduces unnecessary overhead, and we avoid building complexity that does not serve the system.

We are not building a large engineering organization. We are building a precise one.

Structure & Compensation

This is a founding-level role with 2–3% equity, depending on experience and scope. It is designed for someone who is not optimizing for immediate salary, but is thoughtful about long-term value and understands the leverage of joining at this stage.

Where We Are

The product is live in beta, creators are onboarding daily, and the core system is functioning end-to-end. We are entering a phase focused on infrastructure hardening and preparing the platform for public launch.

Why This Work Matters

The infrastructure behind creative work determines who benefits from it. We are rebuilding that infrastructure so that creators retain ownership, control distribution, and participate directly in the revenue their work generates.

Who You Are

This role tends to resonate with engineers who have already operated at a high level and are selective about what they take on next. It is a strong fit for someone who values substance over visibility and can recognize when something is being built with care.