---
title: 'Software Engineer, Agent at OpenArt AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-agent-openart-ai-san-carlos-california-8gj49f59aecb'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Software Engineer, Agent at OpenArt AI

- **Company:** OpenArt AI
- **Location:** San Carlos California, United States
- **Compensation:** $300k–$400k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openart/3dad78e1-8e1f-4dc6-b042-3537b4beec46

## Job description

Software Engineer, Agent

🎨 About OpenArt OpenArt is an AI storytelling and visual creation platform used by millions of creators worldwide. We're building the next generation of creative tools powered by cutting-edge AI — enabling anyone to create videos, visuals, characters, and stories with unprecedented speed and imagination. We believe the future of creativity is AI-native, and we're shaping that future.

🚀 Why Join OpenArt

- Ground floor of a new category — help define what "agent" means for creative work, the way Director redefined what "directing" means for video.
- Small team, massive surface area — engineers own real systems end to end, not slices.
- Real scale, real stakes — your agents run for millions of creators, and what you ship shows up in the product within days.
- Founder-led engineering culture — both founders are technical and deeply involved in product and architecture.
- AI-native product — you'll help decide how frontier models get orchestrated and exposed as experiences that feel effortless rather than technical.
- High ownership, low process — we value judgment, clarity, and speed over bureaucracy.

🎯 About the Role We're hiring engineers to build the agent layer behind OpenArt's next generation of creative products, starting with Director — which lets anyone "vibe direct" a multi-minute cinematic video by chatting with AI. You'll be building the agent infrastructure that pushes experiences like this further: longer-horizon planning, tool use across multiple model vendors, memory across sessions, and the harness that keeps all of it reliable in production. This isn't a research role — it's a product-and-systems role. You'll build on and extend the agent harness (tool use, context management, multi-step planning, evaluation), develop the MCP servers and CLI tooling around it, and ship the frontend experiences that make all of it feel effortless rather than technical. You'll work closely with the founders, the agent team, and design to turn "what should this agent be able to do" into a system that actually does it — reliably, at scale.

🛠 What You’ll Do

- Build and extend the agent harness that powers OpenArt's conversational and autonomous creative workflows: tool use, context/memory management, multi-step planning, and sub-agent orchestration
- Build and maintain MCP servers and CLI-based agent tooling that connect our agents to internal services, external model vendors, and creative asset pipelines
- Author reusable Agent Skills and structured workflows that let agents reliably handle complex, multi-step creative tasks — scene planning, storyboarding, asset generation, revision loops
- Contribute to evaluation frameworks and observability so the team knows when an agent is working well, and can catch regressions before users do
- Ship polished, production frontend experiences (React/Next.js) for agent-driven products, end to end
- Make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, correctness, and scalability — and communicate them clearly
- Partner closely with product, design, and GTM to translate user needs into technical solutions
- Track the fast-moving agent ecosystem (MCP, Agent Skills, orchestration frameworks) and bring the best of it into OpenArt's stack

⚙ What We’re Looking For Core Requirements

- 2+ years of full-stack engineering experience shipping production software
- Hands-on experience building LLM-powered agents or applications that have reached real users — not just prototypes or demos
- Working familiarity with agent harness concepts: tool use, context/memory management, multi-step planning, or sub-agent orchestration
- Solid data modeling and schema design skills for real product use cases
- A strong AI-assisted coding practice — you use tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor as a core part of how you build, and have real opinions about what makes them work well
- Product sense — you think about what makes an agent experience feel trustworthy and delightful, not just functional
- Clear communication — you can explain agent behavior and technical trade-offs to teammates who aren't engineers

## Nice to Have

- Experience authoring reusable Agent Skills or structured agent workflows
- Practical experience building MCP servers or CLI tooling for agents
- Exposure to agent orchestration frameworks (Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph, or similar) or LLM evaluation / observability tooling
- Hands-on experience with image / video generation models
- Startup experience, or having built something 0 to 1 (side projects count)

💰 Compensation

- $300k+ total compensation including base salary, bonus, equity
- Equity - meaningful ownership in what you build
- High autonomy, high growth environment

🌍 Work Setup

- Bay Area preferred (hybrid available)
- Visa sponsorship available

🎯 What Success Looks Like in 3–6 Months

- You've shipped a production agent workflow inside OpenArt's ecosystem, and real users are running it
- You've meaningfully improved a piece of the harness, a set of Agent Skills, or the eval loop — and can point to the metric that moved
- You own at least one part of the agent stack end to end and are the go-to person for it
- You've formed a tight feedback loop with design, founders, and real users
- You're proposing improvements and catching problems early, not just executing on specs

If you want to build the agents that turn frontier models into creative tools millions of people use — and grow fast while doing it — we'd love to talk.

## About OpenArt AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenArt is an all-in-one AI creative platform that enables users to generate, edit, and remix images, videos, characters, audio, and 3D worlds through a single interface.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Coco Mao (CEO), John Qiao (CTO) – both former Google engineers

## Core Business
- Primary Industry: Technology, Information and Internet; AI‑powered creative tools
- Target Customers: B2C (millions of individual creators) and B2B (brands, studios, content teams)
- Mission Statement: “Build the future of storytelling with AI.”

## Products & Services
- **Image Generation & Editing** – Generate images using models like GPT Image 2, Nano Banana Pro, Seedream 5.0, and edit within the same canvas (erase, expand, restyle, upscale to 4K).
- **Video Generation** – Create videos up to 15 seconds at up to 4K resolution, choosing from models such as Veo 3.1, Seedance 2.0, Kling 3.0 Omni, and Sora 2. Refine or edit each generation.
- **Character Builder** – Build consistent characters using reference images or text; characters can be reused across images, scenes, and videos with the same face and style.
- **World** – Generate persistent, navigable 3D spatial environments from a single prompt or reference images; add characters, place objects, take still photos, or export to 3D tools.
- **Audio** – AI voiceovers in 30+ languages with lip‑sync, original music generation, and sound effects (footsteps, rain, etc.). Export as WAV or MP3 timed to video.
- **OpenArt Director** – Storyboard and refine video sequences using natural‑language chat for granular shot‑by‑shot control.
- **Smart Shot** – Convert a single prompt into 3–5 cinematic cuts with varied angles, camera moves, and visual consistency.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metrics**:
  - **Annual Recurring Revenue**: Grew from $10.5 M to over $70 M in 2025 (7× growth) [[openart.ai/blog]](https://openart.ai/blog/the-openart-story/)
  - **Monthly Active Users**: 8 million+ [[openart.ai/blog]](https://openart.ai/blog/the-openart-story/)
- **Total Funding**: $40 M+ across three rounds:
  - Seed (June 2023): $5 M led by DCM Ventures and CapitalOven [[tracxn.com]](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/openart/__rGLZ4jZtTKFqOnIFJpVIpXqrPEtJHfzKwCfxXxYFnns)
  - Venture Round (Aug 2025): $5 M [[linkedin.com]](https://www.linkedin.com/company/openart-ai)
  - Series A (2026–Q1): $30 M – $35 M (conflicting reports) led by Canaan Partners [[openart.ai/blog]](https://openart.ai/blog/the-openart-story/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Canaan Partners, DCM Ventures, CapitalOven; partnerships with leading AI model providers (Seedream, Google Veo, Kling, etc.)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Employee headcount: 67 (1,172.7% YoY growth; 29.6% monthly growth) [[linkedin.com]](https://www.linkedin.com/company/openart-ai)
  - Presence in 17 countries across North America, Asia, and Europe
  - Hosted the world’s first AI Influencer Summit and produced “Bot House,” the first AI reality TV show

## Competitive Advantages
- **All‑in‑one platform**: Instead of juggling separate tools (Midjourney for images, Runway/Sora for video, etc.), users access images, video, characters, audio, and 3D worlds under a single subscription.
- **Character consistency**: A core differentiator – one character can be reused across images, scenes, and videos with the same look, enabling storytelling and AI influencers.
- **Model agnosticism**: The platform bundles multiple top‑tier AI models (Seedream, Veo, GPT Image, Kling, Sora, etc.), letting users pick the best option per project without paying multiple subscriptions.
- **Strong retention driven by storytelling**: The metric most watched is not ARR but how often creators return to deepen characters and expand universes.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building the end‑to‑end creative platform for storytellers (characters, worlds, long‑form video)
- Expand the AI influencer and brand‑mascot market (e.g., AI Influencer Summit, Bot House reality show)
- Deepen integration of audio and video editing for professional studios
- Grow the engineering and product teams – “We’ve nearly doubled in size this year, and the pace isn’t slowing down.” [[openart.ai/blog]](https://openart.ai/blog/the-openart-story/)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Fast‑moving, lean team that “move[s] fast, over‑communicate[s], and put[s] storytelling at the heart of everything.” [[openart.ai/blog]](https://openart.ai/blog/the-openart-story/)
- **Growth trajectory**: Company experienced 7× ARR growth in one year and is actively hiring across departments (engineering, design, product, marketing)
- **Founders**: Ex‑Google (Coco Mao, John Qiao) with a track record of launching products at scale (short‑form video platform acquired by Google Search)
- **Work model**: Hybrid / office presence in San Francisco (HQ) and Redwood City; no formal remote‑first policy stated
- **Notable**: Free trial available for users; employees have backgrounds from top AI companies (Stability AI, Invideo, ImagineArt, etc.)

## Sources
1. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/openart-ai)
2. [openart.ai](https://openart.ai/)
3. [openart.ai/blog](https://openart.ai/blog/the-openart-story/)
4. [tracxn.com](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/openart/__rGLZ4jZtTKFqOnIFJpVIpXqrPEtJHfzKwCfxXxYFnns)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openart)

## Other roles at OpenArt AI

- [Paid Media Creative Strategist](https://feeny.ai/job/paid-media-creative-strategist-openart-ai-pakistan-cdsrc8ja6zs7) — Pakistan
- [Founding Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-customer-success-manager-openart-ai-san-carlos-california-6t3s8nj5yj34) — San Carlos California, United States
- [Strategic Events Manager (Full-Time)](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-events-manager-full-time-openart-ai-san-carlos-california-11yv245e9h2k) — San Carlos California, United States
- [Regional Director, Enterprise Sales](https://feeny.ai/job/regional-director-enterprise-sales-openart-ai-los-angeles-266sjcphr6j1) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Regional Director, Enterprise Sales](https://feeny.ai/job/regional-director-enterprise-sales-openart-ai-new-york-q103rq882hht) — New York, NY
- [Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise AI Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-enterprise-ai-platform-openart-ai-san-carlos-california-m4na5871388h) — San Carlos California, United States
- [Software Engineer, Enterprise AI Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-enterprise-ai-platform-openart-ai-san-carlos-california-q55a3qekea5e) — San Carlos California, United States
- [Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Agent](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-agent-openart-ai-san-carlos-california-hh4qmhs8k5pk) — San Carlos California, United States
- [VP of Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-finance-openart-ai-san-carlos-california-stee72cj1dcs) — San Carlos California, United States
- [Senior Product Manager, Enterprise](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-enterprise-openart-ai-san-carlos-california-ktw96a9jb42g) — San Carlos California, United States