Co-Founder, Founding Engineer

Compensation is equity based at this stage! Salaried after fundraising.Aro is building AI-native animation tools that turn a single 2D illustration into a controllable, reusable animated character.Current animation workflows are either highly manual (rigging, mesh deformation, frame-by-frame cleanup) or based on one-off AI video generation with limited control and reusability. Aro is taking a different approach: AI is used once during setup to generate a persistent character representation, after which animation becomes fast, interactive, and fully controllable.The system combines segmentation and rigging pipelines, generated viewpoints, browser-native rendering, and timeline-based animation controls to enable expressive character motion directly from static artwork.We’re looking for an early technical collaborator / founding engineer interested in problems at the intersection of:generative modelsgraphics/renderinganimation systemscreative toolinginteractive web systemsYou’d work directly on:character representation systemsview synthesis pipelinesbrowser-based animation toolingrendering/runtime systemscreator-facing product designinfrastructure for scalable generation and interactionIdeal candidates are highly self-directed builders with strong technical intuition, product taste, and an interest in empowering individual creators.This is an extremely early-stage role with significant ownership and the potential to evolve into a long-term founding team position depending on fit.NYC preferred.