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Senior Software Engineer, Video
Job Location:
Job Location:
Palo Alto, CA - USA
Yearly Salary:
$ 185000 - 275000
Yearly Salary:
Posted:
22 August 2026 (12 days ago)
Posted:
Application Deadline:
19 November 2026
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Vacancies:
Job Summary
About Mashgin
Mashgin powers the worlds best checkout experience for over 40 million users. Customers just place their items on our kiosks and our AI rings up their entire order in less than a second. With Mashgin lines are now optional.
Mashgins technology powers over 1 billion transactions at your favorite locations including over half of all US professional sports teams 4000 convenience stores major airports universities and more.
Were not just building cutting-edge AIwere creating real-world impact and unforgettable experiences. Backed by a well-funded Series B were also one of the rare AI startups thats already profitable.
Our secret A culture of extreme ownership autonomy and customer obsession. At Mashgin we are building something extraordinary by challenging conventional wisdom. Weve thrown out the old rules to focus on what truly matters: creating a kickass product that makes people say Wow. We dont care about short-term wins; we build systems that stand the test of time. If you thrive in a culture of excellence without compromise and want to see your work have an immediate remarkable impact youre in the right place.
Position Summary
Were looking for an engineer to join a new team building features on top of in-store camera feeds (not the kiosks own sensors but the stores security/overhead cameras). Today that footage mostly just sits on-site unused. This team will build the pipeline to get value out of it whether that means analyzing it where it lives or pulling it into the cloud across thousands of stores each with its own network constraints and camera hardware.
Youll be an early member of the team. That means writing the capture/ingestion code dealing with real codec and streaming decisions (what to encode in how to transport and play back efficiently over constrained store networks) figuring out what stays on-site versus what moves to the cloud and getting the first features hooked up. This has a lot in common with building a video player/streaming stack. We need someone whos comfortable with some ambiguity: requirements that arent fully defined yet tooling you may need to build yourself and a willingness to just build the thing rather than wait for a full spec. This is a hands-on coding role first an infrastructure-design role second.
We maintain a flat high-impact engineering culture where every engineer who joins our team carries the title of Member of Technical Staff.
What We Value:
- Impact: You will own significant responsibility and have total ownership over your work. We stay lean and efficient so your work directly impacts the product we ship every day.
- Simplicity: Complexity is a waste of time herewe take pride in building things that just work.
- Hard Work: Forget the glamorous research papers. We prioritize the hard work it takes to achieve real-world clarity and accuracy. You will innovate relentlessly to push the boundaries of whats possible in visual automation.
- Humility: No task is beneath you. Whether its high-level architecture or grunt work to fix a bug we check our egos at the door and get real work done.
- Ruthless Prioritization: If everything is on fire nothing is. You will be expected to prioritize ruthlessly cutting through distractions to focus on the most impactful product improvements.
- Customer Innovation: We are customer-centric not customer-pleasing. You wont bend to every client demand; you will let innovation drive the product forward to solve the real problems our users face.
- Efficiency: Meetings suck. We keep them short and only use them for alignment giving you your time back to focus on real work.
You Will Be
- Writing the actual code end to end for a 0-to-1 pipeline: capturing feeds from in-store cameras encoding and getting that video where it needs to go whether thats processed on-site or ingested and stored in the cloud with no existing system to extend
- Making real codec and streaming-protocol decisions: encoding formats bitrate/quality tradeoffs adaptive streaming
- Making fast pragmatic calls on architecture with incomplete information and being fine revisiting them as real-world store conditions prove you wrong
- Getting the first feature or two working end-to-end (e.g. a monitoring view or feeding footage into an early AI feature) to prove the pipeline works
- Working alongside a small scrappy group across hardware ML and backend figuring out together what good looks like not inheriting a spec
- Dealing with the reality of store hardware: varying camera models spotty or shared network connections and physical sites you cant always control
- Doing whatever the moment calls for: debugging a flaky store network connection one day writing a service to process or ship video the next
- Using AI coding tools to move fast: prototyping quickly cutting through boilerplate and iterating on architecture without getting bogged down
Minimum Qualifications
- 5 years relevant coding experience with a track record of shipping production code yourself.
- B.S. or higher in Computer Science (or equivalent work experience)
- Strong Python plus comfort picking up whatever language or tool the problem actually needs
- Hands-on experience with video codecs encoding and streaming protocols: video player media pipeline or streaming platform work (think the engineering behind a video player at a company like Crunchyroll Netflix Twitch YouTube)
- Experience touching both sides of a pipeline edge/device code and cloud services rather than only one layer
- Has built something from zero before: a new service a new teams first system a 0-to-1 project with no existing scaffolding
- Comfortable being one of the few people who know how a piece of the system works at least for a while
Preferred Qualifications
- Startup experience ideally on a small or newly-formed team where you wore multiple hats.
- Experience with camera or video hardware in the field (not just cloud-side video) especially dealing with inconsistent hardware or network conditions
- Comfortable working alongside ML engineers without needing to own the modeling work yourself
- Knowledge of infrastructure as code (Terraform Ansible etc.) and cloud environments like AWS
- Good knowledge of algorithms and data structures
- Fluent with AI coding tools (Claude Code Cursor etc.) as a default part of how you build and prototype
What We Offer
- An opportunity to work on a small multidisciplinary team with the potential to break new ground in many different industries
- Excellent health dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents
- 401k plan
- Flexible PTO policy
- Catered lunch in office with fully stocked snacks and beverages
- Pet insurance for your fur babies
- Voluntary life insurance plan
- Competitive salary and options in a small rapidly scaling company
$185000 - $275000 a year
For roles based in Palo Alto CA the overall market range for Mashgin is typically $185000 - $275000 USD annually. Note that total compensation for this position will be determined by candidates relevant qualifications work experience skills and other relevant factors. This estimate excludes the value of any benefits offered by Mashgin and the potential future value of any other long-term incentives.
Mashgin is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Individuals seeking employment at Mashgin are considered without regards to race color religion national origin age sex marital status ancestry physical or mental disability veteran status gender identity or sexual orientation.
Notice on fraudulent jobs
We have been made aware of instances of fraudulent job postings and/or fraudulent recruiting activity by bad actors claiming to represent Mashgin. These fraudulent schemes often seek monetary contributions or payments from job seekers (such as for start up costs or equipment) or seek to collect sensitive personal or banking information from job job postings and offers are not authorized by Mashgin and Mashgin is not responsible for fraudulent offers or requests for personal information or payments. Mashgin will never ask for any financial commitment or contribution from a candidate at any stage of the recruitment process. Candidates who have questions about the validity of Mashgin job postings or offers should consult the job postings on our career site. If you think youve been scammed please referencethis sitefor more information.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process such as reviewing applications analyzing resumes or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed please contact us.
Required Experience:
Senior IC
About Company
Touchless self-checkout system with no barcodes & no wait. We have created the easiest checkout you have ever experienced. Mashgin's A.I.-based technology uses 3D reconstruction, computer vision, and deep learning to identify items.
