---
title: 'Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems at Hedra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-distributed-systems-hedra-san-francisco-2j8k3yzfqbfw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems at Hedra

- **Company:** Hedra
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-05-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hedra/da0ed497-8952-4dea-8057-91c32de437f5

## Job description

## About Hedra

Hedra is the platform, models, and infrastructure for visual intelligence. We build the systems that make large-scale visual inference fast, reliable, and accessible to developers. Our work spans model serving, compute infrastructure, scheduling and routing, APIs, and the developer platform that sits on top of it. We’re a small, highly technical team in San Francisco, backed by a16z and other leading investors. Engineers at Hedra work across boundaries, own systems end to end, and have significant influence over both what we build and how we build it.

## The Role

We’re looking for a Senior or Staff Software Engineer with deep experience building and operating distributed production systems. You’ll work on the infrastructure underlying Hedra’s inference platform: systems that schedule and route compute, serve models efficiently, handle high-throughput workloads, and remain reliable as both traffic and the number of models we support grow. The problems are often ambiguous and don’t have obvious answers. We’re looking for someone who can reason from first principles, identify bottlenecks and failure modes before they become problems, and make thoughtful tradeoffs across performance, reliability, complexity, and cost. You do not need to come from an AI company or already be an expert in model inference. We care much more about depth in distributed systems and your ability to apply that experience to a new problem space.

## What You’ll Do

- Design, build, and operate distributed systems that power Hedra’s inference infrastructure.
- Build systems for scheduling, routing, and managing compute-intensive workloads across heterogeneous resources.
- Improve throughput, latency, reliability, and resource utilization across our serving infrastructure.
- Design systems that remain predictable and resilient under load, partial failures, changing capacity, and unpredictable workloads.
- Own production systems end to end, including deployment, CI/CD, testing and validation, observability, monitoring, alerting, debugging, and incident response.
- Identify architectural bottlenecks and failure modes and drive solutions rather than waiting for problems to be fully specified.
- Work across infrastructure, model serving, APIs, and developer-facing systems as the platform evolves.
- Use modern agentic coding workflows as part of how you design, build, debug, and ship software.
- Help shape the technical direction of a small engineering organization where individual engineers have substantial ownership.

## What We’re Looking For

- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building distributed backend or infrastructure systems.
- A track record of designing and operating high-availability production services at meaningful scale.
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including experience reasoning about concurrency, queues, retries, failure recovery, consistency, backpressure, capacity, and system behavior under load.
- Experience debugging complex production systems across multiple layers of the stack.
- Strong judgment around architectural tradeoffs, particularly reliability, performance, complexity, and operational cost.
- Experience with CI/CD, comprehensive testing and validation strategies, monitoring, alerting, and production operations.
- Strong programming fundamentals and experience working in systems-oriented backend languages. Python experience is helpful given our stack.
- Experience using agentic coding tools and workflows beyond basic prompting.
- Comfort operating in an environment where problems are often underspecified and engineers are expected to independently determine the right approach.
- Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly and collaborate with engineers across infrastructure, research, and product.

## Nice to Have

- Experience with inference or model-serving infrastructure.
- GPU or accelerator infrastructure.
- Compute scheduling, orchestration, or resource management.
- High-throughput or low-latency systems.
- Kubernetes or other cluster orchestration systems.
- Performance optimization and profiling.
- Developer infrastructure, APIs, SDKs, or platform engineering.
- Experience operating infrastructure across cloud and/or bare-metal environments.

## Benefits

- Competitive compensation and equity
- 401k
- Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)
- Lunch and snacks at the office

This role is based in San Francisco, and we work together in person five days a week.

## 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

- [Inference Optimization Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/inference-optimization-engineer-hedra-san-francisco-jn57nvy53h46) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-lead-hedra-san-francisco-e3e47nfe303t) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Video Producer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-video-producer-hedra-san-francisco-s53ek8b939wt) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-marketing-hedra-san-francisco-8ayrt2dd5k6h) — San Francisco, CA
- [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-hedra-san-francisco-07yj5t908tqg) — San Francisco, CA
- [Customer Success Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-engineer-hedra-san-francisco-gkvaxfrqa35z) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-hedra-san-francisco-hngsa0qcezzv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-hedra-san-francisco-60yph5qfns3p) — San Francisco, CA