Full-Time

AI Anime Researcher

Spellbrush

Spellbrush

11-50 employees

Develops AI-enhanced anime turn-based strategy games

No salary listed

H1B Sponsorship Available

San Francisco, CA, USA

In Person

Visa sponsorships available; on-site in Tokyo or San Francisco offices.

Category
AI & Machine Learning (2)
,
Required Skills
Pytorch
Requirements
  • Proficiency in PyTorch (and potentially JAX)
  • Experience with diffusion models and ability to get up to speed quickly
  • Experience designing and developing large-scale diffusion models with a primary focus on images and a secondary focus on other modalities such as 3D, text, video and audio
  • Experience working in small, fast-paced teams and collaborating with production teams
Responsibilities
  • Design and develop large-scale diffusion models with a primary focus on images and secondary modalities including 3D, text, video and audio
  • Work in a tight loop between research and production to deploy models from the lab into production quickly
  • Collaborate with internal studio to develop game-ready models and deploy regular quality updates to nijijourney
  • Contribute to the development of state-of-the-art anime models as part of a small AI team
Desired Qualifications
  • Love for anime and the anime aesthetic
  • Willingness to work on-site in Tokyo or San Francisco (if required by the role)
  • Experience with multi-modal diffusion models or anime-specific datasets (not explicitly stated but inferred as beneficial)

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