Engineering Lead (Platform + AI)

On-site in Los Angeles,CA

Noctal is an LA-based media intelligence company that automates the first-pass assembly of sound inside professional video editing timelines. Our proprietary audio engine analyzes video context and places commercially cleared sound effects across a full editorial timeline automatically, compressing what takes hours of manual labor down to seconds. Two patent-pending systems power the platform. We are not generating sound. We are replacing the most time-intensive layer of professional post-production with intelligent, rights-clear orchestration that learns from every project it touches.

We are venture-backed, live in production, and working with studios. We are hiring a technical leader to drive the platform forward. This is a hands-on role. You will be in the code every day, shipping products, making architecture calls in real time, and building alongside the team. You will work directly alongside the founders and grow with the role as Noctal grows.

Who thrives here:

You have shipped real systems in production. Whether you got there in 3 years or 15, you are past the point of needing someone to hand you a roadmap.

You have built agentic systems, ML pipelines, media infrastructure, or AI-native products, real things in production you can point to. You think in systems, you ship products, you are energized by unsolved problems, and you want to be the technical co-pilot at a company where the role grows as the company grows.

We care more about what you have shipped than what you can say in an interview. 

What you will lead:

• Video ingestion, transcoding, contextual analysis, audio placement, streaming, API layer
• Real-time contextual understanding of video at frame-level precision
• Search and retrieval across a commercially cleared sound library: embeddings, metadata, intelligent matching
• A creative control system that converts text direction into changes on placed audio
• The learning layer: how the platform improves placement quality over time based on real editorial usage
• Credit-based marketplace, multi-tenant architecture, permissioning, and enterprise features 
• Performance and latency. Make it feel fast
• Build-vs-buy tradeoffs, infrastructure strategy, and growing the engineering team as the product grows

Must have:

• Writes code every day and leads people well. You give direct feedback without making it personal, you absorb context before reacting, and the people you have worked with would work with you again.
• Has shipped ML/AI systems where accuracy, latency, and scale were all constraints 
• Has built systems that process, transform, or serve media at scale. Understands the realities of media formats, codecs, frame-level precision, and real-time streaming
• Product-minded. Thinks about the user experience, not just what the system does
• Can point to real things they have built
• Ships fast. This is an early-stage company that moves weekly, not quarterly

Strong advantage:

• Experience with agentic systems, multi-step reasoning pipelines, or autonomous workflows
• Deep work in computer vision, audio processing, NLP, or retrieval systems
• You understand that defensibility is architectural, not cosmetic. You care about how systems compound and how to build things that get harder to replicate over time
• Has hired, mentored, or scaled an engineering team
• Interest in sound, film, or creative tools, you have touched post-production workflows yourself.

Compensation:

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. This is a foundational technical role at a venture-backed company in a category moving fast.

We have product live, an active studio pipeline, and a sound library built for this. The work is developing technologies that protect what makes art human. If that matters to you, reach out.