Software Engineer

Department: Research Team

Location: San Francisco, Tokyo

Employment Type: FullTime

Generalist Software Engineer

About Us

Here at Spellbrush, we're passionate about making a good anime game.

We also happen to be the world's leading generative AI studio — we're the team behind niji・journey.

We are currently investigating how AI can be used to help human artists perform masterpieces in the most complex medium of our times: videogames.

Our games are characterized by a no-compromise approach to well-balanced gameplay married to a truthful love of visual arts.

If you love turn-based tactics games, please consider applying!

About The Role

As Spellbrush continues to grow rapidly, we're seeking talented generalist engineers to join our team and help us build advanced data pipelines, foundational datasets, as well as the tools and infrastructure that support them. If the thought of running a batch job across ten-thousand GPUs to ingest petabytes worth of anime image and videos excites you, this is the job for you!

What You'll Achieve

You'll define the processes and infrastructure to transform and make data readily available across the company, whether it be embeddings, video, bounding boxes, or more.

You'll partner with our world class AI researchers to understand their needs, and then design, build and monitor pipelines that meet today's requirements but can gracefully scale with our growing data size.

Skills You'll Need To Bring

You are a self-starter and can work directly with the research team to gather and synthesize high-impact needs from teammates, designing and implementing the appropriate technical solutions, and effectively communicating about deliverables, timelines and tradeoffs.

You've spent 3+ years as software engineer, with a wide generalist skillset.

You’ve worked with distributed systems, and previously administered a big data toolset (Ray, Spark, Airflow, etc.).

You have hands-on experience shipping scalable data solutions in the cloud (e.g AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.), across multiple data stores (e.g Snowflake, Redshift, Hive, SQL/NoSQL, etc.).

You’re comfortable pulling data from whatever source it may be in, whether that involves writing a complex SQL query to pull a billion rows out of a Bigquery Database, or coordinating the transfer of 10+ PB of data across two S3 regions.

You are highly comfortable with scripting, whether in Typescript, Python, or even Bash when the need arises.

Most importantly, you know when to pull in the complex overengineered tools, and when to instead rely on duct tape.

You may be a good fit if:

You have hands-on experience in designing and building highly scalable and reliable data pipelines

Building data pipelines for AI presents itself with unique challenges. If you’ve previously built large scale big data pipelines, you’d be a good fit.

You’re interested in learning and interfacing with AI researchers

You’ll interface with some of the best AI researchers in the world, meaning that you’ll get to learn from the best. Your code will frequently need to ingest values and embeddings from our state-of-the-art models, and we’ll help you get up to speed here.

You love anime and the anime aesthetic

As a member of our team, you'll have the opportunity to push the boundaries of what's possible in the anime and video game industry. Ideally you're a fan of the genre.

You're comfortable working on small, fast-paced teams

Our engineering team is small but mighty. You'll be working directly with some of the best AI researchers and engineers in the world to integrate their state-of-the-art models into your beautiful interfaces.

We also believe in the unmatched speed of in-person teams, and prefer on-site collaboration in either our primary research office in Tokyo (downtown Akihabara) or San Francisco. Visa sponsorships are available.