AI Engineer (Audio/Video Model)

Senpai & Sakugami Senpai (https://senpaiapp.com) started as a dating app for anime fans — helping people break the ice and connect over their shared passion for anime. We're now pivoting into a social UGC platform in the spirit of TikTok, built to empower anime fans to share their passion with like-minded creators and communities. Our new platform, Sakugami, takes this further — empowering anime fans to become creators themselves, using generative AI to produce long-form content alongside traditional animators and artists. The Role We're looking for an experienced Senior AI Engineer to help power the GenAI backbone of both Senpai and Sakugami. In the near term, you'll build the pipelines that let us integrate existing models like **SeeDance** and **Midjourney** into our product. Longer term, we're keen on developing our own VAM (video/audio model) built specifically for anime — and we need someone who can help take that from idea to reality. This role spans both integration work and original model development, so you'll need to be comfortable operating across the full stack of applied AI engineering — from wiring up third-party APIs to training and fine-tuning models of your own. What You'll Do - Build and maintain pipelines integrating existing AI models (e.g. SeeDance, Midjourney) into our product - Help design and develop our own anime-specific VAM (video/audio model - Train, fine-tune, and evaluate video and/or audio generation models - Curate and manage training datasets, with particular attention to anime-style visual and motion data - Optimize model performance and inference cost for production use - Collaborate with product and design to translate creative goals into technical model requirements What You'll Need - 2-3+ years of experience building AI models, particularly in video or audio generation - Deep experience with Python - Strong experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) - Experience with modern generative architectures relevant to video/audio (e.g. diffusion models, transformers, VAEs) - Experience with **dataset curation and preprocessing** for model training - Comfort working with **GPU-accelerated training** and optimizing for training/inference efficiency - Familiarity with integrating third-party AI APIs into production pipelines Ground-floor opportunity to build a proprietary anime-focused generative model from scratch, not just integrate someone else's Makeshift Software Inc. is the developer of Senpai and Sakugami.