Staff Product Software Engineer

About Luma

• A leading multimodal AI research lab, having built one of the world’s strongest video generation models (Ray-3.14).
• Pushing beyond video toward the next generation of multimodal general intelligence models.
• Operating at a scale few companies can match, with the compute and resources to support frontier research ($900M Series C).
• Focused on the creative domain, where multimodal systems can have immediate real-world impact.
• Shipping tightly integrated products that turn research breakthroughs into tools creators actually use.

Where You Come In

• What to build.
• What not to build.
• Where to draw boundaries.
• What problems deserve structure, and which should stay flexible.

• Translating ambiguous goals into clear technical direction.
• Choosing when to invest in structure and when to stay lightweight.
• Preventing unnecessary complexity from entering the system.
• Aligning product intent with technical reality.
• Teaching others how to use AI tools without overbuilding.

What You’ll Do

• Direct AI coding agents to build production systems quickly, while maintaining discipline around system design, ownership, and real-world behavior.
• Decide what to build and what not to build as implementation costs drop.
• Set technical direction across engineering, including system boundaries, data models, ownership, and operational expectations.
• Co-own product direction in partnership with design and research, defining both what we build and how we build it.
• Make and stand behind hard tradeoffs between speed, reliability, complexity, and extensibility.
• Shape architecture early, before decisions harden into constraints.
• Own critical outcomes end-to-end, from problem framing to deployment and iteration.

Raise the Bar

• Set the standard for technical depth, judgment, and production ownership.
• Prevent avoidable complexity from entering the system as iteration speed increases.
• Mentor engineers on how to use AI tools effectively without lowering engineering rigor.
• Identify and eliminate recurring classes of design mistakes before they scale.

Multiply the Organization

• Design systems and workflows that allow small teams to ship with outsized impact.
• Attract exceptional engineers and help them grow into high-judgment technical leaders.
• Increase team velocity without increasing operational and conceptual overhead.

Who You Are

Required:

• You have 8+ years of experience building and shipping production software.
• You have led multiple non-trivial projects, owning technical direction and execution end-to-end.
• You have made high-stakes technical decisions that materially affected a system or product.
• You are fluent with AI coding tools and have used them to ship real functionality in production or substantial side projects.

• Strong technical depth: System design, distributed systems, security, infrastructure.
• Strong product intuition: User empathy, prioritization, taste in UX.
• (Ideally, both)

What Sets You Apart

• You led a product that reached 100k+ users or 1M+ monthly active users.
• You designed and led a production system serving millions of requests per day.
• You created or led an open-source project with 10k+ stars or meaningful external adoption.

Why This Role Exists

• How research turns into products.
• How those products scale.
• How fast we can move without losing rigor.
• How engineering operates in an AI-native company.

Compensation

About Luma