Full-Time

Software Engineer

Spellbrush

Spellbrush

11-50 employees

Develops AI-enhanced anime turn-based strategy games

No salary listed

San Francisco, CA, USA

In Person

On-site in Tokyo or San Francisco; visa sponsorships available.

Category
Software Engineering (1)
Required Skills
Bash
Microsoft Azure
Redshift
Python
Airflow
NoSQL
BigQuery
Apache Spark
SQL
TypeScript
AWS
Snowflake
Google Cloud Platform
Requirements
  • You have 3+ years as a software engineer with a wide generalist skillset.
  • You have worked with distributed systems, and have previously administered a big data toolset (Ray, Spark, Airflow, etc.).
  • You have hands-on experience shipping scalable data solutions in the cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.), across multiple data stores (Snowflake, Redshift, Hive, SQL/NoSQL, etc.).
  • You are comfortable pulling data from diverse sources, including writing complex SQL queries to pull a billion rows from a BigQuery database, or coordinating the transfer of 10+ petabytes of data across two S3 regions.
  • You are highly comfortable with scripting, in TypeScript, Python, or Bash when needed.
  • You are a self-starter who can work directly with the research team to gather high-impact needs, and design and implement the appropriate technical solutions, and you can effectively communicate deliverables, timelines and tradeoffs.
Responsibilities
  • Define the processes and infrastructure to transform and make data readily available across the company, including embeddings, video, bounding boxes, and other data types.
  • Partner with AI researchers to understand their needs, then design, build and monitor pipelines that meet today''s requirements but can scale as data grows.
  • Build and maintain data pipelines and the tools and infrastructure that support them, enabling ingestion, processing, and distribution of large-scale data across multiple systems.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure data quality, governance, and reliability of data pipelines.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience designing and building highly scalable and reliable data pipelines.
  • Experience building large-scale big data pipelines.
  • Interest in learning and interfacing with AI researchers.
  • Enjoys anime and the anime aesthetic.
  • Willingness to work in a small, fast-paced team and contribute to on-site collaboration in Tokyo or San Francisco; visa sponsorships are available.

Spellbrush creates anime-themed video games that fuse strategic, turn-based tactical gameplay with generative AI to assist artists in producing high-quality visuals. The product works by using AI to generate art assets and other content that players experience during gameplay, while developers ensure balanced mechanics and polished visuals in each game. The company distinguishes itself from competitors by combining a strong love for anime and tactical gameplay with AI-powered art generation, which helps produce distinctive, visually appealing games that still emphasize thoughtful strategy. Revenue comes from direct digital game sales, with potential additions such as DLCs, in-game purchases, and collaborations with other studios or tech partners to leverage their AI capabilities. Spellbrush’s goal is to build a dedicated community of anime and strategy game fans by delivering well-crafted, visually striking turn-based tactics games enhanced by AI.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$130K

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2018

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Actively hiring to build first AI-generated anime video game expands development.
  • Generative AI speeds illustration, slashing manual shading and coloring labor.
  • Targets niche anime turn-based tactics gamers with balanced, high-quality visuals.

What critics are saying

  • Midjourney's niji·journey v6 erodes leadership since December 2024.
  • OpenAI's Sora undermines video generation advantage since 2025 launch.
  • Nintendo shuts down anime-inspired games via 2025 IP enforcement takedowns.

What makes Spellbrush unique

  • Spellbrush generates character images in under 2 seconds versus 2-15 hours manually.
  • YC-backed studio founded in 2016 by Cory Li focuses on AI anime games.
  • AI tools enable rapid production of hundreds of visual variations for games.

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Benefits

Relocation Assistance

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-3%

1 year growth

-6%

2 year growth

-3%
VentureBeat
Oct 18th, 2023
Midjourney’S First Mobile App Is Here…Sort Of

VentureBeat presents: AI Unleashed - An exclusive executive event for enterprise data leaders. Network and learn with industry peers. Learn More. Bootstrapped startup Midjourney offers a popular text-to-image AI generator from its own foundation model. Since its beta launch in the summer of 2022, it has built a thriving community of users on its official server within the separate messaging app Discord — exceeding 16 million at the time of this article’s publication, including VentureBeat (we use it and other AI art generators to illustrate articles). To this day, more than a year later, Discord remains the primary means by which users can interact with Midjourney — they simply type in a text prompts to the Midjourney Bot in Discord, which in turn, produces quartets of generated images for the user to choose from, download, remix, edit sections of, pan over, or otherwise iterate on