About the role
Founding AI Engineer at Hera (YC S25)
We're building the world's first AI motion designer that creates professional animations in seconds.
About Hera
Video is the most effective medium, but video creators waste countless hours animating seconds of content. Motion design tools like After Effects require mastering complex user interfaces, turning creative work into button-clicking hell. We're starting with motion design because it's the most painful and expensive part of video creation.
Hera is the first AI motion designer that creates professional animations through conversation. Unlike video-gen tools, Hera generates code-based animations where every parameter can be fine-tuned through prompts or on-canvas editing, giving users the control of After Effects with the simplicity of Lovable.
In our first two weeks after launch, users created over 200,000 animations.
Our founders: Peter Tribelhorn (CEO) built YouTube channels with 50B+ views. Chia-Lun Wu (CTO) was one of the first developers at Vyond, where he built their video editor used by 20,000 businesses today.
About the Role
- Build and optimize AI systems to generate high-quality animations that follow core motion design principles (easing, non-linear movement, visual hierarchy)
- Develop comprehensive evaluation frameworks to assess animation quality, combining automated metrics with expert validation from motion designers
- Partner with motion designers and marketers to translate professional design knowledge into AI training data and evaluation criteria
- Design and implement fine-tuning pipelines that teach Hera domain-specific animation styles and brand guidelines
- Create feedback loops between user preferences, expert input, and model performance to continuously improve animation quality
