Cascade Studio
Senior Software Engineer, Media & Video Engine
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About Cascade
Cascade is an AI-native, end-to-end filmmaking platform, built by filmmakers, for filmmakers. In one seamless, web-based environment, creators can go from first idea through script, storyboard, character generation, scene assembly and final edit – without leaving the platform.
Our Open Beta is live, and we've moved from launch mode into growth – building a roster of creative partners and an audience of independent filmmakers and directors who are making the case for our platform.
The creator economy is $250 billion and growing at 22% a year. Over 50 million filmmakers and creators are drowning in fragmented tools and broken workflows. Cascade replaces the stack.
The Role
Own the media playback and processing foundations beneath Cascade’s browser-based video editor.
You will work on the problems that make professional video editing difficult in the browser: frame-accurate seeking, smooth scrubbing, audio/video synchronisation, multi-track playback, decoder behaviour, memory pressure, difficult source media and consistency between interactive preview and final output.
The objective is to make editing and playback feel reliable and responsive across real-world projects, media formats and devices.
Responsibilities
- Own frame-accurate video playback, seeking, scrubbing and audio/video synchronisation.
- Improve browser-side decoding, buffering and media scheduling for responsive multi-track editing.
- Handle real-world container and codec behaviour, including keyframes, timestamps, variable frame rates and difficult media files.
- Diagnose playback problems involving dropped frames, seeking inaccuracies, decoder state, memory pressure and browser/device differences.
- Improve interaction between media playback and GPU-assisted rendering/compositing.
- Design caching, proxy and media-preparation strategies for demanding or high-resolution source material.
- Improve performance and memory behaviour across long and complex timelines.
- Maintain consistency between editor preview and final rendered output.
- Establish reproducible media test fixtures, performance benchmarks and regression coverage.
- Investigate and resolve media-specific production issues across browsers and operating systems.
- Contribute to the technical direction of future desktop/native media capabilities without prematurely rebuilding the web product.
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Who We’re Looking For
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- 3+ years directly building video players, editors, transcoding systems, streaming products or production media pipelines.
- Strong experience with browser-based video/media applications.
- Deep understanding of video timing, frame timestamps, keyframes, seeking, synchronisation and variable frame-rate media.
- Strong understanding of common media containers and codecs.
- Experience working with browser media APIs, decoding pipelines, audio playback and rendering loops.
- Strong performance profiling, memory-management and concurrency skills.
- Experience diagnosing browser, device and operating-system-specific playback behaviour.
- Strong understanding of asynchronous processing, workers and keeping heavy media operations away from the main UI thread.
- Strong software-engineering fundamentals and ability to work between high-level product code and lower-level media systems.
- Evidence of personally owning production media reliability not simply integrating an existing video-player library.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building a professional video editor, NLE, VFX application, review platform or creative-media tool.
- Experience with WebCodecs or equivalent low-level browser/native media APIs.
- Canvas, WebGL, WebGPU or GPU-based compositing/rendering experience.
- Deep knowledge of MP4/fMP4 internals, demuxing, GOP structure and PTS/DTS timing.
- Experience with professional media-processing or transcoding libraries.
- Colour-management, HDR or preview-versus-export parity experience.
- Hardware-accelerated decoding/encoding knowledge.
- Native desktop media-framework experience.
- Experience with proxy workflows for high-resolution media.
- Experience establishing media conformance, performance and regression suites.
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What We Offer
- Competitive salary benchmarked against early-stage London tech.
- A genuinely exciting product to direct for – built by filmmakers, for filmmakers, at the frontier of AI.
- Remote working.
- A team culture built on craft, speed and ambition. We take the work seriously, not ourselves.
- The chance to define Cascade's creative voice and build the function as we grow.
Our Principles
We hire people who share these values:
- We build from scratch, we do not maintain the status quo: Builder mindset
- Everything we do is in service of the storytellers using our platform: Creator-first
- Speed matters, and so does quality - we do not sacrifice one for the other: Move fast, ship well
- We say what we think, give feedback clearly, and expect the same in return: Honest and direct
- We use AI at every level, including in how we work and expect our team to do the same: AI-native
Our Brand Values
- Story first. Always. Every decision exists in service of the story. Technology is the means. The story is the thing. Every product decision, every design choice, every line of copy exists to serve one purpose — getting great stories made.
- Democratise great filmmaking. Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn't. Cascade exists to level the playing field — so the best ideas get made regardless of budget, backing or postcode.
- Supercharge the human. Don't replace them. Storytelling is an art. AI is a tool, not a creative director. The best work comes from people with vision, instinct and an understanding of performance, pacing and story. Cascade is designed to supercharge that talent — not replace it.
- Slick by design. Relentless by nature. Cascade is built to be powerful, intuitive and genuinely easy to use. And we believe things can always be better, so we'll never stop listening, improving and working to support the people using Cascade.
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