Full-Stack Engineer

ShortKit is bringing every developer the SOTA media infrastructure that powers platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Our technology enables the fastest growing consumer apps, marketplaces, brands, and publishers to launch exceptional media experiences without needing an in-house video engineering org. That spans mobile SDKs, video infrastructure, AI tooling, and a developer experience that makes sophisticated video products feel effortless to build.

We're backed by world-class investors and our team spent nearly a decade building the infrastructure behind YouTube Shorts.

We're looking for a versatile engineer who likes owning problems across the stack. You'll help scale infrastructure that processes hundreds of thousands of videos, iterate on the mobile SDKs that power millions of daily views, and work directly with fast-growing customers to get integrations into production.

What you'll build

• Media infrastructure at scale. Evolve the systems that ingest, process, transcode, and deliver media across ShortKit. Work on everything from media processing pipelines to high-throughput event systems, improving reliability, performance, observability, and efficiency as usage grows.
• Mobile SDKs and playback. Iterate on our native iOS and Android SDKs and React Native and Flutter integrations. Extend the APIs, components, and underlying systems developers use to build fast, reliable, highly customizable media experiences.
• AI infrastructure. Build and improve the data pipelines and services behind recommendations and AI-powered media features, turning content, behavioral signals, and large volumes of events into systems that can operate reliably in production.
• Customer integrations that scale. Work directly with customer engineering teams from implementation through launch. Debug problems across their application and our stack, write integration code when needed, and turn recurring challenges into better APIs, SDK abstractions, tooling, diagnostics, and documentation.

A project might involve tracing a slow first frame across a customer's app and our delivery stack, evolving a transcoding pipeline as volume grows, designing a service to process a high volume of playback events, adding a capability across our mobile SDKs, or turning something that required custom integration work for one customer into a primitive every ShortKit developer can use in production.

Across all of this, you will work beyond a narrowly defined part of the stack: you understand the problem, design the right solution, ship it, and watch how it behaves in production.

The following traits describe a strong fit:

• You've shipped software that real people use and can take a loosely defined problem from investigation through production.
• You have strong backend or full-stack fundamentals, including APIs, databases, distributed and asynchronous systems, and debugging.
• You've worked on production systems where scale and reliability matter. You're comfortable reasoning about performance, failure modes, observability, and what happens when systems are under load.
• You're willing to work deeply in mobile code. Experience with Swift or Kotlin is valuable; curiosity and the ability to become effective in unfamiliar systems matter more than knowing our exact stack.
• You enjoy working directly with other developers. You can understand their constraints, debug alongside them, explain technical tradeoffs, and own a problem through resolution.
• You care about both system behavior and the details developers and end users actually feel: latency, reliability, smooth playback, useful errors, and APIs that make sense.
• You exercise good judgment about when to ship a focused fix and when a problem deserves a more durable architectural solution.

Our stack

Python and FastAPI; PostgreSQL and Redis; Google Cloud, including Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Tasks; React, Next.js, and TypeScript; Swift and Kotlin; React Native and Flutter are the technologies we use every day.

Experience with every technology listed is not required. We care about your engineering fundamentals, what you've built, and how quickly you can become effective.

Why ShortKit

Video is becoming a core part of consumer products across nearly every category, but building great video experiences still requires infrastructure and expertise that most companies cannot build in-house.

Our team has experience building companies from the ground up and spent years building video infrastructure at YouTube scale. We're applying that experience to build the media infrastructure layer for the next generation of consumer products.

ShortKit is at a particularly exciting stage to join: we're a small team moving incredibly fast, but our infrastructure already powers millions of video views in production across consumer social, marketplaces, ecommerce, and more. Team members have broad autonomy and ownership; you'll make decisions that shape the product and architecture, work directly with customers, and see the systems you build operate at meaningful scale.

We offer competitive salaries and meaningful equity.