About Ponder

Ponder is building the “Cursor” for video editing.

We're backed by Aaron Levie (Box), Emery Wells (Frame.io), Jared Leto and others top tier investors. We have 25,000+ video creators on our waitlist, working with design partners in professional video production ahead of our public launch.

Our founding team includes alumni from Vercel, Amazon, exited founders, filmmakers, researchers, and engineers.

We're looking for a founding research engineer to build the creative intelligence layer behind Ponder with us. You'll own the systems that make our agent work, from multimodal perception to long-horizon planning to self-improvement. You'll be shaping the research direction alongside the founders and shipping it into the hands of potentially millions of professional video creators.

What you'll build

• Agentic systems that reason over large volumes of video — audio, visuals, transcript, timeline state — to make creative editing decisions autonomously
• Self-improving agents that learn from usage patterns, human feedback, and structured evaluation loops
• Retrieval, memory, and multimodal perception pipelines that let our agent navigate hundreds of gigabytes of media and find the moments that matter
• Benchmarking and evals that measures creative work: narrative quality, coherence, pacing, and creative judgment.
• Production-grade reliability across tool use, long-horizon planning, and latency-sensitive editing workflows

What You’ve Done

• Trained or fine-tuned models — whether through reinforcement learning, RLHF, supervised fine-tuning, or other methods — and shipped to real users
• Built with multimodal models across text, vision, video, and audio
• Worked deeply with embeddings, retrieval architectures, and structured planning for open-ended tasks
• Designed eval frameworks that drove measurable improvement over time, not just one-off benchmarks
• Made architectural decisions independently in fast-moving environments
• Written clean, maintainable research code that other engineers can build on

You should be great at