Cardboard, Inc—React Native Engineer

Job description

Description: ABOUT - We're building the future of storytelling and video editing. - We're a small team that moves fast and builds things we're proud of. - We care obsessively about taste: in design, in product, in every detail. - We're solving these hard problems. - We're backed by a Tier-1 global fund, YC, and founders of billion dollar companies. ENGINEERING Video is the most powerful way humans tell stories. It always has been. But creating it today is still painfully hard. Fragmented tools, steep learning curves, and workflows that get in the way of the actual creative work. We're building Cardboard to change that. Cardboard runs a real video editor in the browser, backed by a cloud media pipeline and an AI agent that understands footage. We're hiring a React Native Engineer to own Cardboard's mobile experience. You'll make the early decisions on architecture and media handling, and you'll own the quality of everything we ship on iOS and Android. You'll be working alongside a team of engineers who all care deeply about craft, including the founders. You like owning problems end to end, and you'd rather ship something great this week than something perfect next quarter. WHAT YOU'LL ACTUALLY DO - Build and ship Cardboard on iOS and Android. - Make media-heavy interfaces smooth, with gestures and animations that hold 60fps or better. - Handle real phone footage: 4K HEVC, HDR, variable frame rates, and multi-gigabyte files. - Build uploads that work on bad networks and keep going when the app is in the background. - Write native modules in Swift and Kotlin when JavaScript isn't enough. - Solve these hard problems. WHO YOU ARE - You've shipped and maintained React Native apps in production, ideally ones people use every day. - You're comfortable with native iOS and Android code. You can read a native crash log, profile the JS and UI threads, and find out why frames are dropping. - You know the modern stack well: TypeScript, Expo, the New Architecture, Reanimated, and Gesture Handler. - You have strong product taste. You notice when an interaction doesn't feel native, and you fix it. - You thrive in a fast-moving, lightly-processed environment where you set your own bar. - Bonus: you've worked with AVFoundation, MediaCodec, Skia, or on-device ML, or you've built a camera, photo, or video app. WHAT YOU GET You'd be surrounded by people who are absurdly good at what they do. One started coding at 11 and shipped an app with 6M+ downloads in high school. One got into CS engineering at 14 and has been working on distributed systems for 8+ years. One's an ex-founder who took a company to 1.2M users and $300M+ in transactions. That's the team. We're looking for someone who'll raise the bar on technical craftsmanship and product quality. Apart from that you'd get: - Competitive salary and founding-team equity. - Unlimited tokens across every AI model. Use whatever you want, as much as you want. - A healthy budget for AI tools and any peripherals you need to do your best work.