Applied AI Engineer, Creative Experiences

Pika • Palo Alto, CA

11h

About The Position

Pika is seeking a creative, hands-on AI researcher to turn current models, APIs, and emerging ideas into compelling experiences. The role combines models across image, video, audio, and language to build workflows, demos, and features that attract users and contribute to revenue growth.

This is a goal-driven applied research role open to full-time hires and interns. The engineer takes ideas from opportunity identification through experimentation, implementation, and delivery, then uses feedback and results to decide what to improve. Creative judgment, resourcefulness, and fast execution are central to the role.

Success means delivering a steady stream of compelling, usable experiments, turning the strongest ideas into repeatable workflows, and learning from releases about what attracts users and contributes to Pika’s growth. Success is measured by the quality, speed, and impact of deliverables.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience building with generative AI models, APIs, or creative workflows, with examples of work taken from idea to working result.
• Strong prototyping and coding skills, including connecting tools, debugging pipelines, and making end-to-end experiences work.
• Creative, entrepreneurial mindset and judgment about what makes an output compelling, useful, and shareable.
• Ability to test ideas quickly and get working results into users’ hands.
• Curiosity across modalities and ability to learn unfamiliar models and tools quickly.
• Ownership and comfort with tight timelines, including prioritizing, simplifying approaches, and recognizing when shipping and learning is more valuable than further polishing.
• Ability to connect technical choices to intended user or business outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Experience as a startup founder or early-stage startup team member, or actively building and testing startup ideas.
• Hackathon wins or standout hackathon projects demonstrating rapid prototyping, resourcefulness, and end-to-end execution.
• Experience with LoRA fine-tuning, lightweight model adaptation, or other targeted post-training.
• Experience combining image, video, audio, or language models in a single workflow.
• Experience building creative demos, interactive prototypes, or AI experiences that reached real users.

Responsibilities

• Identify promising opportunities by tracking new models, tools, creative formats, and cultural trends, and assess their audiences, use cases, and potential to drive interest, traffic, or revenue.
• Combine existing models, APIs, and tools into working multimodal workflows; take concepts through to usable demos, creative assets, or product experiences.
• Test practical approaches quickly and use lightweight LoRA fine-tuning or targeted post-training when it meaningfully improves results within the project’s time budget.
• Work in short iteration cycles, scope experiments, deliver strong first versions quickly, and balance research, output quality, cost, and delivery time.
• Create compelling demos and creative outputs for social media, launches, and other growth efforts; personally posting or managing social channels is not required.
• Use audience response, product feedback, and relevant traffic or revenue signals to decide which ideas to refine, expand, or stop.
• Document successful work with reusable workflows and examples so the team can reproduce and build on it.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed