Design Engineer

FOUNDING TASTE ENGINEERNew York or San Francisco. Full-time. $180,000–$240,000 plus 0.5%–2.0% equity.WHY NOWFor five centuries, taste was enforced by cost. Making things was expensive, so you made few of them, and someone agonized over every one. Film stock had a price per foot. Type was cut into metal by hand. Nobody had to defend quality as a principle, because scarcity defended it for them.That defense collapsed in about three years. A team can now produce ten thousand credible options before lunch for close to nothing. Everything downstream of that fact is still being worked out, and most of it has not been noticed yet.THE ANTAGONISTHere is the largest piece. A model is trained on everything ever made, so what it returns is the center of everything ever made. Ask for a film poster and you get the average of a million film posters, rendered beautifully. Harmless once. Run it at the scale this industry now runs it, and the visual and written output of the culture starts sliding toward one indistinguishable middle.Today the only thing standing between a given piece of work and that middle is a person with strong taste who says no. They generate forty options, kill thirty-nine, and rebuild the fortieth by hand. Their judgment does the job that cost used to do.It is a fragile defense, through no fault of theirs. It lives nowhere except in their heads and cannot be handed to anyone. When they take another job it goes with them, and the pressure to move faster erodes whatever is left. The volume climbs every quarter while the defense stays exactly one person wide.THE PRECEDENTSoftware lived through this. In the 1970s, engineering judgment sat inside individuals, evaporated when they quit, and could not be inspected or argued with by anyone else. Then it became infrastructure: written down, versioned, diffable, revertible, shared. A decision made once could be examined by a stranger years later and either kept or overturned on purpose.That single change is most of the reason software compounds while other disciplines keep relearning the same things. Judgment became something the group owned.WHAT WE ARE BUILDINGNothing like it exists for creative work. Spool records the decisions a team is already making: what got chosen, what got killed, and why. It encodes the reasoning underneath them, so the standard can be applied by a machine, inspected by a human, and carried across every model that comes next.If we get this right, a team's standard outlives the person who formed it, sharpens every time it is used, and stops being the first thing that breaks when the work speeds up. We think it is the most valuable unbuilt thing in creative software.THE ROLEAlmost all of the difficulty sits in one question, and it would be yours: what exactly gets captured at the moment a person makes a creative decision.Store too little and the pattern is noise. Generalize too hard and every output drifts toward a single house style, which is the failure this company exists to prevent. Nobody has solved it. There is no paper to implement and no architecture waiting behind a door for you.You would be the first engineer here. You would build the loop end to end and run it against real creative work in text, image, video, and audio. Expect to prototype quickly, throw most of it away, and argue about specifics with people who care as much as you do.WHOThe person who can do this is rare, and we would rather wait for them.You have deep opinions in at least one craft where quality is arguable and measurable: typography, color, mastering, edit rhythm, camera. You can defend them technically to someone who disagrees, and you have changed your mind at least once when they were right.You can look at two versions of the same thing and say precisely what makes one worse, in language another person can act on. Something like "the kerning is loose at display size and the second beat lands a frame late," with the specifics filled in.You can build the prototype yourself. Most of this role is systems design, and there is nobody to hand the implementation to.If your instinct when you see variation is to standardize it, this will be a frustrating job. The work is keeping judgment specific while making it portable, and those two pull against each other every single day.We do not screen on degrees, years of experience, or job titles.TERMS$180,000 to $240,000 depending on experience, plus 0.5% to 2.0% equity on standard four-year vesting. You get the number on the first call.Health, dental, and vision, covered for you and your dependents. 401(k). Three weeks of vacation as a floor rather than a ceiling.$10,000 a year to go wander. Go look at things; museums, film prints, concerts, type archives - or go get your hands dirty, go admire the craft of someone who makes beautiful, TASTEFUL, things ; whatever sharpens your eye. No approval process and no receipts to defend.HOW TO APPLYSend whatever represents your work best. Send whatever inspires you, excites you and why. Then pick one piece of it and write a paragraph on what you would change now and why, in specific terms. That paragraph is the part we read first.Skip the cover letter. hello@spool.visionMost engineering roles open right now will help the average arrive faster. This one exists to keep the average from winning. We are small, pre-launch, and in private preview at spool.vision.