Founding Engineer

About Aspect

Intelligent media storage for creative teams.

Tech

The core of Aspect is a virtual filesystem that mounts S3 cloud storage as a native hard drive. An editor in New York opens a 200GB project and it streams in real-time, with no syncing and no downloading, while a colorist in London edits the same file and sees changes propagate instantly. Making this work means solving hard problems: tiered caching (memory, local server, cloud) so a video scrub hits warm storage instead of stalling on a round trip, concurrent writes from multiple machines without corruption, recovering from mid-upload network drops without re-sending gigabytes, and offline work that syncs cleanly on reconnect. Around that we're building: * A **multimodal understanding pipeline** that breaks media into searchable, structured data, including scene boundaries, transcription, visual and text embeddings, and LLM-extracted metadata, with dependency-orchestrated processing stages, and more modalities and agentic "deep research" queries on the way. * A **Postgres-native backend** where the database is also the job queue, vector search engine, permission system, and coordination layer, deliberately simple in dependencies and deep in how it uses them. * A **React frontend + SDK** shared across web and desktop clients, with SDKs published to npm and PyPI and integrations like a Premiere Pro panel coming next.

The role

## The Role We're looking for a Founding Engineer to help build the core product and infrastructure behind Aspect, the single platform replacing the five-plus tools creative teams juggle today. You'll work across the entire stack: the virtual filesystem that streams S3 cloud storage to editors as a native hard drive in real-time, a Postgres-native backend that doubles as our job queue, vector search engine, and permission system, and a React frontend shared between our web app and desktop client. As the founding engineer, you'll own problems end-to-end, from shaping product interactions with design to production rollout. We work directly with some of the best creative brands and agencies in the world every day, and we value engineers who move quickly, think from first principles, and care deeply about product quality and the experience of the people who depend on us to ship their work. ## What You'll Do * Build and ship product across the full stack, from frontend interactions to backend infrastructure and the systems that tie them together. * Solve hard distributed-systems problems at the core of our virtual filesystem: tiered caching, concurrent writes without corruption, network-drop recovery, and offline sync. * Extend our multimodal understanding pipeline, breaking media into searchable, structured data across scene boundaries, transcription, embeddings, and LLM-extracted metadata. * Design new capabilities for our AI agent: what it can see across a media library, what it can act on, and how it communicates back to users. * Build infrastructure for long-running, multi-step media workflows, including retries, dependency orchestration, and human-in-the-loop interactions. * Develop evals, traces, and internal tooling to measure and improve agent and pipeline quality over time. * Work closely with founders, design, and product to define how creative teams work in the future. ## What We're Looking For * 2+ years of experience building production software at high-growth technology companies or startups. * Strong experience with TypeScript across both frontend and backend systems. * Product-minded engineer with strong ownership and the ability to operate autonomously. * Strong taste for product quality, interaction design, and engineering craftsmanship. * Excited about the intersection of creative production and AI * Comfortable working in-person from our NYC office 5-6 days a week. Bonus points if you've worked with: * Distributed systems, filesystems, or storage infrastructure * AI/ML pipelines or multimodal understanding systems * Creative tool software or media-heavy applications

Skills

• PostgreSQL
• Python
• TypeScript