---
title: 'Applied AI Engineer, Creative Experiences at Pika'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-creative-experiences-pika-palo-alto-1sveavaqdjy0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-11'
---

# Applied AI Engineer, Creative Experiences at Pika

- **Company:** Pika
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pika/b075e6fb-df01-4eac-9437-1c1db97ea881

## Job description

Open to full-time hires and interns.

## About the role

At Pika, we're looking for a creative, hands-on AI researcher who can turn the latest models, APIs, and emerging ideas into compelling experiences people want to try and share. You'll combine models across image, video, audio, and language to build workflows, demos, and features that bring people to Pika and contribute to revenue growth. This is a goal-driven applied research role, open to both full-time hires and interns. You'll take ideas from an initial opportunity through experimentation, implementation, and delivery, then use feedback and results to decide what to improve next. Strong creative judgment, resourcefulness, and fast execution are central to the role.

## What you'll do

- Find promising opportunities. Stay close to new models, tools, creative formats, and cultural trends. Identify ideas with a clear audience, use case, and potential to drive interest, website traffic, or revenue.
- Build end to end. Combine existing models, APIs, and tools into working multimodal workflows. Own the path from a rough concept to a usable demo, creative asset, or product experience.
- Choose the right amount of research. Test practical approaches quickly. Use lightweight LoRA fine-tuning or targeted post-training when it meaningfully improves the result and fits the project's time budget.
- Deliver frequently. Work in short iteration cycles, set a clear scope for each experiment, and get strong first versions out quickly. Make thoughtful trade-offs between additional research, output quality, cost, and time to delivery.
- Create work ready to share. Produce compelling demos and creative outputs that the team can use for social media, launches, and other growth efforts. Personally posting on or managing social channels is not required.
- Learn from results. Use audience response, product feedback, and relevant traffic or revenue signals to decide which ideas to refine, expand, or stop.
- Make successful work reusable. Leave working workflows, examples, and concise documentation so the team can reproduce and build on what you deliver.

## What we're looking for

- Hands-on experience building with generative AI models, APIs, or creative workflows, with examples of work you have taken from idea to a working result.
- Strong prototyping and coding skills: you can connect tools, debug a pipeline, and make an end-to-end experience work.
- A creative, entrepreneurial mindset and good judgment about what makes an output compelling, useful, and worth sharing. You enjoy the pace and resourcefulness of a hackathon: testing ideas quickly and getting a working result into people's hands.
- Curiosity across modalities and the ability to learn unfamiliar models and tools quickly.
- Ownership and comfort with tight timelines: you can prioritize, simplify an approach, and recognize when shipping and learning is more valuable than further polishing.
- A clear connection between technical choices and the intended user or business outcome.

Helpful experience

- Experience as a startup founder or early-stage startup team member, or actively building and testing startup ideas.
- Hackathon wins or standout hackathon projects that demonstrate rapid prototyping, resourcefulness, and end-to-end execution.
- LoRA fine-tuning, lightweight model adaptation, or other targeted post-training.
- Combining image, video, audio, or language models in a single workflow.
- Building creative demos, interactive prototypes, or AI experiences that reached real users.

What success looks like You deliver a steady stream of compelling, usable experiments; turn the strongest ideas into repeatable workflows; and use each release to learn what attracts users and contributes to Pika's growth. Success depends on the quality, speed, and impact of what you deliver.

## About Pika

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Pika is an AI-native creative platform that enables users to generate, edit, and transform videos—and now "birth" persistent AI agents—from text, images, and voice.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States (also has an office in Mountain View, CA)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Demi Guo (CEO), Chenlin Meng (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Generative AI / AI Video & Agent Platform
- **Target customers**: B2C (creators, social media users, marketers) and B2B (developers via Pika API and MCP)
- **Mission or purpose**: To make video creation accessible to everyone, and now to give everyone a "creative partner" AI agent

## Products & Services
- **Pika Video App**: The core product—an AI video generator that turns text prompts, images, and videos into new clips. Supports styles (3D animation, anime, cartoon, cinematic) and effects like "squish it, melt it, cake-ify it."
- **Pika Agent**: A persistent, portable AI agent that users "birth" and own. Multi-modal (text, voice, image, video) and lives across platforms. Users can train it to have personality, memory, and voice—essentially a creative co-pilot.
- **AI Trendmaker**: A feature that lets users hop on viral video trends with just a selfie and a sound.
- **Pika API**: Hosted API for developers to integrate Pika's video generation capabilities into their own apps and workflows.
- **Pika MCP**: Model Context Protocol for connecting agents to external tools and data.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (estimated at ~$470M post-money based on Series B terms)
- **Total Funding**: $135M across 4 rounds
  - Pre-Seed (Jan 2023): $15M led by Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross
  - Seed (May 2023): Amount undisclosed
  - Series A (Nov 2023): $35M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
  - Series B (Jun 2024): $80M led by Spark Capital
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Spark Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 27.4% YoY to 59 employees
  - Monthly website visits: ~1.87M (global rank #25,677)
  - Talent sourced from top AI labs (TikTok, Jane Street, Runway, Kling AI, Snap Inc.)
  - 1 active job posting (Head of Engineering) as of mid-2026
  - Launched Pika Agent and Pika API in 2025-2026, expanding beyond video generation into agentic AI

## Competitive Advantages
- **"Birth and own" agent model**: Pika is pioneering the concept of a user-owned, persistent AI agent that evolves with the user—different from one-off chatbot interactions.
- **Multi-modal creative platform**: Combines video generation, agent capabilities, and trend tools in one ecosystem.
- **Strong early traction and talent density**: Raised $135M quickly from top-tier investors; alumni from TikTok, Runway, Jane Street, and other elite tech firms.
- **Small, high-leverage team**: ~59 people operating globally with a "small, dynamic team" culture that values efficiency and ambition.

## Strategic Focus
- **Agent-first future**: Pika is shifting from "just a video tool" to an agent platform where users create and own their AI creative partner.
- **Platform expansion**: Opening up via API and MCP to integrate with external apps and workflows.
- **Global reach**: Operating in 19 countries with a distributed (but Palo Alto-centric) team.
- **Continued R&D in generative video**: Improving realism, style variety, and real-time generation.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Pika describes itself as "small, dynamic" and values "efficiency, collaboration, and creativity." They seek "intellect, work ethic, and ambition."
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Not explicitly stated, but the team is distributed across 19 countries (with the US hub in Palo Alto/Mountain View). Likely hybrid or flexible.
- **Notable perks**: The careers page emphasizes "career growth in a culture that fosters both individual and collective development." They also champion an inclusive culture.
- **Engineering culture**: Tech stack includes Python, TypeScript, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, React, and more. The team has strong representation from top AI labs and trading firms. The open role is Head of Engineering, suggesting they need a senior leader to scale.
- **Impact**: You'd be building the infrastructure for a new category of "owned AI agents" and state-of-the-art video generation—working on cutting-edge generative AI.

## Sources
1. [pika.art](https://pika.art/) – Official website
2. [pika.art/careers](https://pika.art/careers) – Careers page
3. [LinkedIn (Pika Labs)](https://www.linkedin.com/company/pika-labs) – Company data, headcount, funding, talent
4. [Craft.co](https://craft.co/pika-art) – Company summary, locations, sectors
5. [Apple App Store](https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/pika-ai-self-agent/id6758411447) – Pika Agent app details

## Other roles at Pika

- [Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-applied-ai-pika-palo-alto-xzd7dyv18dk2) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Research Scientist, Post-Training — Video Generation](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-post-training-video-generation-pika-united-states-7p60ewgn092p) — United States
- [Creator and Influencer Partnerships Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/creator-and-influencer-partnerships-manager-pika-palo-alto-fcyyn6t3ebrn) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Product Designer (AI Native)](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-ai-native-pika-united-states-5jmsmgqqc59k) — United States
- [Data Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/data-engineer-pika-united-states-z74nah1052dn) — United States
- [Growth Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-engineer-pika-united-states-ve2g8v53yde2) — United States
- [Head of Engineer, Product](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineer-product-pika-united-states-nze1qewm24g3) — United States
- [Principal Software Engineer, Product](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-software-engineer-product-pika-united-states-5mj1z1a3yqdf) — United States
- [Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Product](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-product-pika-united-states-0m6ceye0wm3c) — United States
- [Head of Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-finance-pika-palo-alto-amgp22pfthqa) — Palo Alto, CA