---
title: 'Research Engineer at Hedra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-hedra-san-francisco-60yph5qfns3p'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Research Engineer at Hedra

- **Company:** Hedra
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-04-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hedra/b99b5901-84ff-4d39-a50f-77ef9767ddd3

## Job description

## OVERVIEW:

Hedra is a pioneering generative modeling company — first models to market — now building a Physical AI team to bring these models to real-world industry and economy use cases. As a Research Engineer on our Physical AI team, you will lead pre-training and post-training on action-conditioned world models, working hand-in-hand with industrial partners to close the loop between generative AI and physical systems. This is not a black-box applied role: your work will be published, your infrastructure will be serious, and your impact will be direct. If you want to work at the frontier of generative modeling and physical AI, this is the team.

## RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Design, implement, and run pre-training and post-training pipelines for action-conditioned world models and vision-language-action (VLA) models
- Develop and refine training methodologies, including fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and large-scale multimodal learning
- Design and generate training and evaluation datasets from simulation, including environment setup, domain randomization, and sim-to-real transfer strategies
- Build distributed training infrastructure using PyTorch, FSDP, and DeepSpeed
- Work with multimodal data pipelines involving video, sensory inputs, and action sequences
- Evaluate model performance using both benchmark datasets and real-world deployment metrics
- Contributions research publications a plus
- Collaborate with industrial partners to adapt generative models for real-world physical AI applications

## QUALIFICATIONS:

- Experience with pre-training or post-training on large generative models (video, multimodal, or action-conditioned)
- Hands-on proficiency with PyTorch and distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DeepSpeed)
- Strong fundamentals in machine learning, optimization, and large-scale data processing
- Familiarity with VLMs, VLAs, or world models
- Background in robotics, embodied AI, or sim-to-real transfer is a plus
- Experience with video understanding or temporal reasoning is a plus
- BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field

## BENEFITS:

- Competitive compensation and equity
- 401k (no match)
- Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)
- Lunch and snacks at the office

We encourage you to apply even if you don't fully meet all the listed requirements; we value potential and diverse perspectives, and your unique skills could be a great asset to our team.

## About Hedra

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Hedra is a Frontier AI Lab building a unified creative superintelligence platform that enables content creators and marketers to generate video, image, and audio content using proprietary and partner AI models.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (also has an office in New York)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Not publicly named; the founding team is listed as part of the core leadership.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Generative AI (GenAI), Creative Software, Video Production, Marketing Technology
- **Target customers**: B2B (content creators, marketers, businesses of all sizes); B2C (individual creators). Over 125k businesses use the platform.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Help build the future of generative media" and "usher in a new era of visual-first storytelling, where every creator can create stunning content at scale." [hedra.com](https://www.hedra.com/company)

## Products & Services
- **Hedra Agent**: A creative agent that learns a user’s brand, connects to their data, searches the web, and creates reusable skills. It can strategize, ideate, plan, and execute creative work.
- **Character-3 (Proprietary Model)**: Hedra’s category-leading audio-to-video multimodal foundation model for video generation, enabling realistic character animation and lip-sync.
- **Character-1.5**: An earlier version of their video generation model.
- **Infinite Canvas**: A workspace where users can generate videos using Hedra’s proprietary models or other leading generative AI models.
- **All-the-Models Platform**: Provides access to top models across video, image, and audio categories, with an agent that intelligently selects the right model for each task.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding**: $43M (as of latest reports) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Index Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Alexa Fund, AWS Generative AI Accelerator. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/hedra)
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Used by over 125,000 businesses.
    - Headcount grew +108.7% year-over-year (reaching ~44 employees).
    - Raised $32M in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz in May 2025. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs)
    - Received $1M in non-equity assistance from Amazon Web Services in November 2025. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs)
    - Billions of impressions generated by their models. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unified Creative Superintelligence**: Combines a proprietary agent, top-tier models (including their own Character-3), and an infinite canvas into a single workflow, competing with fragmented tools.
- **Category-Leading Video Model**: Their audio-to-video multimodal foundation model (Character-3) is a key differentiator in the generative video space.
- **Brand Learning**: The platform learns from every asset a user creates, building deep brand intelligence that accelerates workflow and ensures output alignment over time.
- **Strong Funding & Backing**: Backed by top-tier VCs (a16z, Index Ventures) and strategic partners (AWS, Alexa Fund), providing resources for rapid scaling.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the Agent**: Developing the "Hedra Agent" to be the central hub for creative work, capable of researching, reasoning, and producing content.
- **Multi-Model Platform**: Continuing to integrate the best models across video, image, and audio, rather than relying solely on a single proprietary model.
- **Enterprise Readiness**: Targeting large businesses with features like brand intelligence, reusable skills, and data connectivity.
- **International Growth**: Operating in 11 countries and actively hiring to support global expansion. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs)

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact Work**: Join a small, fast-growing team (~44 people) building frontier AI models and products that are already used by hundreds of thousands of businesses.
- **Culture & Values**: Emphasizes ownership, action, hands-on leadership, customer obsession, empathy, respect, and unity. Described as a meritocracy where ideas are valued regardless of title. [hedra.com](https://www.hedra.com/company)
- **Cutting-Edge Tech**: Work on the latest in generative AI (video, image, audio) with a team that includes talent from Meta, HeyGen, Synthesia, and other top AI labs. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs)
- **Locations**: Offices in San Francisco and New York. Remote/hybrid policy is not explicitly stated, but the presence of multiple offices and a globally distributed team suggests flexibility.
- **Active Hiring**: Currently hiring for multiple high-impact roles including Research Scientist, Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Research Engineer, Staff Growth Engineer, and Senior Backend Engineer. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hedra)
- **Rapid Growth**: Yearly headcount growth of +108.7% and strong funding signal a high-growth trajectory with ample opportunity for career advancement. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs)

## Sources
1. [hedra.com](https://www.hedra.com/)
2. [hedra.com/company](https://www.hedra.com/company)
3. [hedra.com/careers](https://www.hedra.com/careers)
4. [linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hedra-labs)
5. [cbinsights.com/company/hedra](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/hedra)
6. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/hedra](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hedra)

## Other roles at Hedra

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