Senior Full Stack Engineer

ABOUT POPCORN Popcorn is an AI studio changing how ads get made. Brands and creators start with a product link and finish with a complete video ad — script, cast, location, storyboard, voiceover and final render, generated end to end in minutes. We are built for the Middle East and Arabic-first, and we are scaling now. Behind that simplicity is the hard part. A single ad is a chain of AI calls running for minutes across multiple providers, producing large media files, costing real money per render, and it has to survive every kind of failure without losing a customer's work or their credits. THE ROLE We are hiring a Principal Full Stack Engineer to take technical ownership of the platform. This is the most senior engineering hire we will make this year. You will own the architecture, the backend, the database, security and infrastructure — and you will build new product surfaces on top of them. You will set the technical direction, and you will still be writing the code. We are in a scaling phase. The decisions you make in the first six months will determine what we can build for the next three years. WHAT YOU WILL OWN - The architecture. Go deep on the foundations early, then own the technical direction from there. - The backend. The generation pipeline that orchestrates long-running AI renders across multiple providers, and everything that keeps it reliable. - The database. Schema design, indexing strategy, query performance and migration discipline on PostgreSQL. - Security. Authentication, authorization, data protection, and the standards that keep customer work and payment data safe. - Infrastructure and delivery. Serverless environments, CI, releases, and the operational health of production. - New studios. Building the next creation surfaces end to end, from database to interface. - Quality across the product. Holding a consistently high bar on performance, reliability and craft in every studio we ship. - Scale. Keeping the platform fast, the architecture sound and the unit economics healthy as load grows. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR - 8+ years building software, with deep backend experience on systems carrying real production traffic. - Deep PostgreSQL: schema design, indexing, query plans, transactions, isolation levels, and how all of it behaves under load. - Strong TypeScript and Node in production, plus genuine React and Next.js experience. This codebase is TypeScript end to end. - You have designed and operated asynchronous, long-running systems where work takes minutes and failure is normal. You know why exactly-once is a lie and what to do instead. - Solid security fundamentals — authentication, authorization, data handling, and the common ways applications get compromised. - You have owned production: deployments, CI, and being responsible when something breaks. - Experience with systems that handle money, and the instinct for what correctness there costs — idempotency, reconciliation, and designing for the retry that will definitely happen. - You have taken a system through a growth phase and seen what breaks at ten times the load. - You operate without a spec. Given a goal and a constraint, you come back with a design, the tradeoffs and a recommendation. BONUS POINTS - AI or ML infrastructure: inference orchestration, provider fallback, cost control per request. - Media engineering — ffmpeg, transcoding, large-file handling, object storage and CDN delivery. - Payments and billing, especially usage-based or credit-based models. - Bilingual or RTL product experience. OUR STACK TypeScript end to end. React 19 and Next.js 15 App Router with Tailwind and our own design system. Next.js route handlers on Node. PostgreSQL with Prisma and hand-written SQL migrations. Vercel serverless. Blob storage with CDN delivery, ffmpeg and sharp for media. Auth.js for authentication. Stripe for payments. Multiple AI providers across video, image, speech, lip-sync and language. Vitest. You do not need to have used all of it. We care about the depth of your judgment, not the length of your tool list. WHAT WE OFFER - Competitive salary - Full technical ownership of a product in its scaling phase - Direct access to the founders - Medical insurance - Annual leave HIRING PROCESS 1. Intro call, 30 minutes. 2. Systems conversation, 90 minutes — we go deep on something you designed and operated: the constraints, the tradeoffs, and what broke. 3. Architecture session — we take a real problem from our roadmap and design it together. 4. Final conversation with the founders. HOW TO APPLY Apply through LinkedIn with your CV, or email hedar@popcornstudio.ai Tell us about a system you designed that had to survive failure, and what went wrong anyway. Popcorn is an equal opportunity employer. We hire on capability and craft, and we welcome applicants of every background, gender and religion.