Careers
Join us and build the most expressive AI characters in the world
Building expressive, talking characters. From scratch.
Lemon Slice's mission is to build the world's best video foundation model for human motion and emotion. We allow creators to generate expressive, talking head videos from just a single image.
We've raised a $6M seed round from top investors including Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, The Chainsmokers, Emmett Shear (Founder/CEO at Twitch), Arash Ferdowsi (Founder/CTO at Dropbox), and many others. Lemon Slice has been featured on the All In Podcast, front page of Hacker News, and voted a top 5 product on Product Hunt.
We train our own video models because we believe the winners of this GenAI wave will be vertically integrated. There are no textbooks for training video diffusion transformers. There is no map. Join us and be part of the early pioneers defining the bleeding edge of AI video development
Our usage and user base is growing rapidly with over 1M videos generated on the platform. We are looking for talented folks to help grow the momentum.
Open Positions
Founding Full-Stack Software Engineer
Lemon Slice - San Francisco, CA
What You'll Do
We're looking for a talented, motivated engineer who can wear many hats. Everyone in our close-knit team works across technical areas, from frontend to backend and from AI research to data engineering.
For example, in a typical two-week period you might do 2-3 of the following:
- Ship new web app features and handle customer support requests
- Clean and label internet-scale video data
- Scour arXiv papers for ideas on how to fix a specific diffusion bug
- Monitor training of our latest diffusion transformer model across 100s of GPUs
- Do what it takes to cut our inference costs
- Launch a new 0-1 consumer app experience
With that said, a big thrust of your work will be building and maintaining performant web applications.
Requirements
- Ship production code for all aspects of our web applications using NextJS, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase / PostgreSQL, Python, and Modal
- Strong Python skills (incl. data cleaning and labeling, data infrastructure, data visualization)
- Ability to rapidly prototype solutions and iterate on them with tight product deadlines
- Ability to handle open-ended problems (often comes from research experiences)
Nice-to-haves
- Prior startup experience
- Experience with deep learning (PyTorch, distributed training, etc)
- Excitement about consumer products and AI
- A hobby in the arts (video, photography, music, anime, etc)
About you
- You have strong experience in React and web development, such that typical performance issues rarely happen.
- You take extreme pride in your work. You're unhappy shipping anything that doesn't look and work great.
- You have design taste and are able to build beautiful, user-friendly interfaces.
- You are comfortable both shipping new 0-1 prototypes as well as features for large, existing codebases.
- You're worked on open-ended data problems and are comfortable wrangling large-scale datasets.
- You're intellectually curious, a good communicator, take feedback well, and have the ability to operate with high velocity.
Logistics
- This is a full-time, in-person opportunity in San Francisco.
- Salary: $140,000 - $220,000 a year
- Equity: 0.5%-2.0%
- Visa sponsorship available for exceptional candidates (STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1)
- Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area
- 90% Gold PPO plan coverage of medical, dental, and vision
How to Apply
Send your resume AND the link to your personal portfolio (or a specific project you're proud of) to:
founders@lemonslice.comFounding Front-End Engineer
Lemon Slice - San Francisco, CA
What You'll Do
We're hiring a talented web UI engineer to join our small team building the Lemon Slice web application. We're looking for self-starters who take extreme pride in their work.
In a typical 2-week period you might do 2-3 of the following:
- Ship a new 0-1 consumer app experience
- Design creative, lemon-related animations that play while users are waiting for videos
- Talk to users via Discord and email. Fix bugs they report. Prioritize feature requests.
- Add a user onboarding tour to the Lemon Slice studio
- Build a dynamic gallery that showcases user videos and makes it easy to share and remix
About you
- You have a record of shipping products to customers
- You're an expert in the modern front-end stack (JavaScript/TypeScript, CSS, Tailwind, React, NextJS, etc)
- You are unhappy shipping anything that doesn't look and work great
- You have great taste in design. You can go quickly from sketching a few options to then implementing a beautiful new feature.
- You have proficiency with tools like debuggers, profilers, and flamegraphs to identify areas of improvement for performance
- You have a growth mindset and are willing to do what it takes to make LemonSlice successful
Nice-to-haves
- Proficiency with animation libraries and tools (3JS, WebGL, Framer Motion, GSAP, GLSL shaders, etc)
- Experience with large-scale video applications, such that typical loading delays and performance issues rarely happen
- Familiarity using GenAI creative tools such as Midjourney, Leonardo, Kling/Luma/Runway, Suno, etc.
- Interest in consumer products
How to Apply
Send your resume AND the link to your personal portfolio (or a specific project you're proud of) to:
founders@lemonslice.comFounding Creative Producer
Lemon Slice - San Francisco, CA (or remote)
We're looking for a deeply creative person to join our team and help share Lemon Slice with the world. The role of creative producer involves creating interesting, captivating content around Lemon Slice. We're looking for a creative generalist with a broad set of skills.
What You'll Do
To give a sense of the types of creative endeavors you'll be working on, here is a (non-exhaustive) list of what you might be doing as Creative Producer at Lemon Slice. There are opportunities to shape this role based on your interests, either more creative, more growth focused, or more technical.
An ideal candidate will have a proven track record in 2-3 of these areas.
- [*Must have*] GenAI video and video editing. Make captivating launch videos and tutorials using LemonSlice and other GenAI video models (Kling, Runway, Luma, etc).
- You're a good fit if: You have a portfolio of captivating short videos including GenAI content, video editing, and motion graphics
- Social media. Help define and implement LemonSlice's social media strategy including videos, images, animations, memes, and more.
- You're a good fit if: You've grown a social media channel from 0 to 50k+ subscribers
- Partnerships and Viral Marketing Stunts. Work with the CEO to define the creative partnership strategy (e.g. famous musicians, top-tier companies, etc) and then produce content to make them as successful as possible.
- You're a good fit if: You've produced content that has gone viral
- Writing. Come up with ideas and write interesting, SEO-optimized blogs for LemonSlice. You convert these into Twitter threads and Instagram shorts.
- You're a good fit if: You have a track record of writing popular blog posts
- Vlogging and Traditional Video. Help film and edit content about Lemon Slice in real life. The goal is to show the world behind the scenes of what it looks like to build an AI company in Silicon Valley and train video foundation models from scratch.
- You're a good fit if: You've edited popular vlogs or YouTube channels before
Requirements
- You have a pro at video editing (e.g. Premiere Pro, CapCut, AfterEffects, etc)
- You're exploding with creative ideas plus have an ability to get things done quickly
- You have an expansive creative portfolio across video and other domains
- You're excited to be at a fast-paced, high-growth tech startup
Applied AI Researcher
Lemon Slice - San Francisco, CA
Full job description coming soon.
There are not many teams in the world training their own diffusion transformer models from scratch. We are one of them. Join us and be part of the early pioneers defining the bleeding edge of AI video development.
What You'll Do
- Train large-scale diffusion transformer models across 100s of GPUs
- Distill models to run cheaply and quickly without sacrificing quality
- Stay up to date with the latest DiT techniques by reading arXiv papers. Proactively bring up ideas to the team of what we could be doing technically.
- Clean and label internet-scale video data
- Train LoRAs to enable new features
Requirements
We care about a proven track record working on transformer and/or diffusion models. This can come from a PhD in the field or from building side projects and contributing to open-source repos.
How to Apply
Send your resume AND links to your research papers, GitHub repos, or other relevant work to:
founders@lemonslice.comDon't see a role for you?
Are you an AI researcher who is actively contributing to video DiT repos, such as FastVideo or OpenSoraPlan?
A designer who can code stunning front-end interfaces?
A video editor who wants to produce eye-catching launch videos and document the startup journey?
Or maybe you're a creative content person that's grown a following from 0 to 50k on social media?
We'd love to hear from you! Write to founders@lemonslice.com with the subject "Applying to Lemon Slice", and tell us about yourself.
PS - Our CEO created a video series called "How to get a job at a startup". One of the main tips is that it if you can figure out how to add value, you'll get an opportunity at the company eventually.
Header video by @yesmaybeno using Lemon Slice.