Full-Time
Machine Learning Engineer
Inference & Optimization
Pika
51-200 employees
AI-powered video creation and editing tools
Compensation Overview
$250k - $350k/yr
Palo Alto, CA, USA
Hybrid
Three to five days per week in the Palo Alto office.
 AI & Machine Learning (1) |
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- At least 5 years of engineering experience with a strong track record in inference acceleration and model deployment at scale.
- Proven expertise in inference optimization, including quantization, attention acceleration, and deep learning compiler stacks.
- Deep knowledge of GPU programming using CUDA and NCCL, with experience in sequence, tensor, pipeline, and other parallelism approaches for distributed inference.
- Familiarity with video generation models and large language models.
- Strong cross-discipline communication skills and the ability to drive shared goals across research and engineering functions.
- Ability to work independently, solve problems, and manage ambiguity in a fast-paced startup environment.
- Lead and implement advanced inference acceleration techniques, including attention optimization and quantization for efficient model serving.
- Engineer and optimize GPU strategies across tensor, sequence, and pipeline parallelism for efficiency and scalability.
- Develop and optimize high-performance computing kernels and distributed workloads using CUDA and NCCL.
- Collaborate with research and engineering teams to bring video generation and large language models into production.
- Contribute to improvements in model training speed, stability, and resource utilization as part of the deployment lifecycle.
- Drive code reviews, participate in technical discussions, and mentor fellow engineers on best practices in inference and GPU programming.
- Experience enhancing training efficiency, stability, or resource optimization for large models.
- Experience with high-throughput video or real-time streaming model deployment.
- Familiarity with distributed training and optimization toolkits.
- Contributions to open source projects in AI infrastructure or deep learning compilers.
- Startup or rapid prototyping experience.
Pika.art builds an online platform that turns ideas into videos using AI. It offers text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video transformations so users can create, edit, and extend videos with simple text commands. The product works through AI-powered video generation and editing tools accessible in a browser-like interface, enabling users to modify scenes, extend runtimes, and resize canvases without deep technical skills. Pika differentiates itself by targeting a broad range of creators—from casual meme makers to professional filmmakers—with a user-friendly, text-driven workflow and a subscription-based model that likely includes premium features for advanced tools. The company’s goal is to democratize video creation by making powerful AI-assisted video production accessible and customizable to everyday users and professionals alike.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series B
Total Funding
$135M
Headquarters
Palo Alto, California
Founded
2023
Get referred to Pika
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- August 2026 pricing undercuts Runway Dev by 80% on Seedance 2.0.
- Pika says the API Club ships 70-plus models for video, image, sound, language.
- Pika still hires in Palo Alto, including backend, research, iOS, and product roles.
What critics are saying
- OpenAI, Google, ByteDance, and Runway bundle better video models into larger products.
- If OpenAI's Sora API returns in 2026, Pika's consumer moat collapses fast.
- Terms updated August 4, 2026 still let Pika train on aggregated user data.
What makes Pika unique
- August 4, 2026 API Club bundles 100+ models through one Pika API key.
- Pika's app stays creator-friendly, with fast short-form video effects and edits.
- A $10 monthly membership and near-zero margin make Pika brutally price-transparent.
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Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
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↑ 5%AI is closing the gap between idea and execution! This week at a glance. * Developer AI: Google launches Gemini 3.7 Flash with stronger coding and automation performance at half the introductory price of its predecessor. * AI Video: Higgsfield releases Cinema Studio 4 with eight new production controls for camera movement, lighting, color grading, and character emotion. * AI Music: Pika Labs launches four AI audio models for speech, music, sound effects, and synchronized soundtracks at up to 20x lower prices than rivals. * Creative AI: FLORA launches Fashion Studio, taking apparel brands from hand- drawn sketches to Shopify-ready campaign assets in one workspace. * AI Video: Topaz Labs releases Hyperion 2.5, bringing AI-generated video into professional HDR workflows for broadcast and streaming. Google launches Gemini 3.7 Flash with stronger coding performance and half the previous price. Higgsfield launches Cinema Studio 4 with eight new production controls for solo creators. Topaz Labs releases Hyperion 2.5, letting AI generated video enter professional HDR workflows. Pika Labs launches four AI audio models at prices up to 20 times lower than rivals. FLORA launches Fashion Studio, taking apparel brands from hand drawn sketch to Shopify campaign in one workspace.
AI daily|openai pauses RL training for safety; GLM-5.3 released; Claude adds Gmail & Drive connectors. August 19, 2026 Updated Aug 19 Model releases & updates. GLM-5.3 - Zhipu AI (Z.ai). * TL;DR: Zhipu AI officially released GLM-5.3, securing a top score on the Artificial Analysis index through advanced post-training improvements. * Key Highlights: * Scores 60 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching Kimi K3 as one of the highest-performing open base models available. * Significant performance jump driven purely by post-training: Terminal-Bench 3.0 surged from 4.6 to 28.3, and DeepSWE v1.1 rose from 46.2 to 66.9 compared to GLM-5.2. * Retains identical pricing as GLM-5.2 with lower output token generation per task, accessible immediately via Z.ai API, OpenRouter, and Vercel AI Gateway. * Specs: Mixture-of-Experts (753B Total / 40B Active) / Open Weights (releasing within a week) / 1M Context Window * Links: | Z.ai Documentation Pika Soundtrack - Pika labs. * TL;DR: Pika introduced Pika Soundtrack, a latent diffusion transformer model engineered for precise video-to-audio synchronization. * Key Highlights: * Cross-attends latent video tokens with semantic audio prompt tokens to generate motion-aware sound effects, ambient audio, and score tracks. * Ranked #1 for semantic alignment (0.2457 ImageBind) and audiovisual synchronization (0.5537 DeSync) across a 67-chunk benchmark test. * Released via the Pika API Club at up to 50% lower cost compared to competing generative audio models. * Specs: Proprietary Video-to-Audio Model / Latent Diffusion Transformer / Multi-Modal Alignment * Links: Product releases & updates. Direct Gmail & Google Drive connectors - Anthropic (Claude). * What's New: Anthropic integrated direct Google Workspace connectors into Claude. Users can now prompt Claude to search Google Drive files or draft and send emails directly inside Gmail. Built-in permission gates allow users to specify when human confirmation is required before any email is dispatched. * Who It's For: Knowledge workers, managers, and enterprise users automating daily email and document workflows. * Try It: Origin native git hosting - Cursor. * What's New: Cursor launched Origin, a native code-hosting platform built on database-grade storage infrastructure. Designed for high uptime and performance, Origin features bi-directional GitHub synchronization, PR management, and inline repository editing directly within the Cursor ecosystem. * Who It's For: Software engineers and enterprise teams seeking high-reliability git infrastructure for AI-driven development. * Try It: TensorRT Model Connect - NVIDIA. * What's New: NVIDIA released the public preview of TensorRT Model Connect (TRTMC), an open-source tool that converts Hugging Face or local model checkpoints directly into native C++ TensorRT inference engines in two commands, completely eliminating intermediate ONNX conversions. * Who It's For: AI infrastructure engineers, C++ developers, and high-performance inference builders. * Try It: | GitHub Repository ChatGPT for Teens - OpenAI. * What's New: OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Teens for users aged 13-17. The feature automatically turns on enhanced content safety guardrails, Study Hours scheduling, parental controls, and a step-by-step "Study Mode" designed to guide students through homework problems rather than providing direct answers. * Who It's For: Teenagers, parents, and educators looking for safe, educational AI assistance. * Try It: OpenAI Announcement AI SDK "code Mode" Sandbox execution - Vercel. * What's New: Vercel added "Code Mode" to the AI SDK. Instead of relying solely on multi-turn JSON tool calls, models generate JavaScript/TypeScript code that executes within an isolated QuickJS sandbox to programmatically orchestrate and run tool sequences in a single turn. * Who It's For: Full-stack developers building complex, multi-tool AI agents and autonomous web applications. * Try It: fx lightweight agent harness - Vercel Labs. * What's New: Vercel Labs open-sourced fx, a minimalist coding agent harness written natively in Zig. Featuring a 6.3MB binary, single-digit megabyte memory usage, and 10-microsecond cold-start execution, fx is optimized for high-speed terminal development, WebAssembly embedding, and lightweight agent evaluation. * Who It's For: Developers seeking fast, open-source terminal coding agents and embeddable harnesses. * Try It: Industry news. OpenAI pauses frontier RL training to strengthen AI safety protocols. * What Happened: OpenAI announced a two-week pause on reinforcement learning (RL) training for its next-generation deployment models - including the upcoming Astra model - to harden internal research environments and expand red-teaming. Additionally, OpenAI is dedicating up to 20% of its research inference compute toward multi-stage chain-of-thought monitoring to detect concerning model behaviors prior to public release. * Why It Matters: This marks a major voluntary pause by a leading frontier lab triggered by internal capability thresholds. As AI capabilities in cybersecurity advance, safety verification and alignment monitoring are increasingly determining the pace of frontier model deployments. * Source: OpenAI Announcement | OpenAI, NVIDIA, and SB Energy Partner on 8GW Data Center Project. * What Happened: OpenAI, NVIDIA, and SoftBank's SB Energy finalized an agreement to construct the PORTS-Pike data center campus in Ohio. The project targets 10GW of clean energy generation and up to 8GW of dedicated AI factory compute capacity, with NVIDIA providing up to $105 billion in financial backstop guarantees for the long-term lease. * Why It Matters: The deal illustrates the huge capital requirements and novel financial structures needed for next-generation compute scaling, with hardware providers directly underwriting data center infrastructure to secure capacity for frontier AI labs. * Source: Pew survey: over 50% of young adults in the US concerned about AI job impact. * What Happened: A new Pew Research survey revealed that 55% of US adults under 30 express more concern than excitement regarding artificial intelligence. Furthermore, 73% of young respondents expect AI to reduce overall jobs over the next two decades, up from 61% in 2024. * Why It Matters: Public sentiment among younger demographics is increasingly shifting toward economic displacement concerns, which could impact future US regulatory policy, labor legislation, and consumer adoption rates. * Source: Vercel launches $1 million hacker challenge for sandbox security. * What Happened: Vercel announced a 1,000,000publicbugbountyprogramforVercelSandbox.SecurityresearchersandAIdevelopersareinvitedtousefrontierAImodelstoattemptescapingtheFirecrackermicroVMorbypassinghost−sidenetworkisolation,withbountiesreachingupto1,000,000publicbugbountyprogramforVercelSandbox.SecurityresearchersandAIdevelopersareinvitedtousefrontierAImodelstoattemptescapingtheFirecrackermicroVMorbypassinghost−sidenetworkisolation,withbountiesreachingupto50,000 per verified report. * Why It Matters: As autonomous coding agents gain permissions to execute untrusted code in production, verifying microVM boundaries against AI-driven exploits is becoming critical enterprise infrastructure security work. * Source: Vercel Blog | Research papers. Autonomous protein design via frontier LLMs - Anthropic Research. * Motivation: Computational protein design traditionally relies on human domain experts to manually configure complex multi-step pipelines, creating a major bottleneck in drug discovery and biological research. * Key Innovation: Anthropic evaluated Claude's ability to autonomously run computational protein design workflows without human intervention. Using expert-written protocols, Claude designed novel protein binders for 15 biological targets, which were subsequently synthesized and laboratory-tested by Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience. * Results: Claude achieved a 22.6%-35.1% binding success rate (354 out of 1,320 designs bound successfully across 14 targets) - roughly doubling the traditional human expert benchmark of 10%-15%. * Paper: Anthropic Research | Other Highlights. Mojo programming language officially open sourced - Modular. * Overview: Modular officially open-sourced the Mojo compiler and toolchain under the Apache 2.0 license (with LLVM exceptions) following its 1.0 release. Designed to simplify high-performance GPU programming with Python-inspired syntax, Mojo's core codebase is now publicly available on GitHub. * Link: Modular Blog Miles v0.1 open-source RL framework - RadixArk. * Overview: RadixArk released Miles v0.1, an open-source reinforcement learning framework for LLMs and vision-language models. Developed by 72 contributors, Miles focuses on RL debugging and hardware utilization, passing 85 end-to-end GPU CI tests across models like DeepSeek V4, Kimi K3, and Qwen 3.8. * Link: Featured Partners
Pika has launched the Pika API Club, a $10-per-month membership offering developers access to over 70 generative AI models through a single API. The service includes models for video, image, sound, and language generation at near-wholesale prices. The company says AI startups currently spend 40-50% of revenue on model inference, more than double typical SaaS companies. Pika's pricing undercuts competitors significantly: Seedance 2.0 runs up to 80% cheaper than Runway Dev and roughly 2x cheaper than Fal.ai, whilst Kling 3.0 and GPT Image 2.0 are approximately 20% below Fal's pricing. The Lightspeed-backed company achieves these savings by reducing its profit margin to nearly zero. CEO Demi Guo said developers were "shocked" to learn they'd been paying 3x markups on generative AI models. The API Club is available at dev.pika.art.
Pika cuts AI's 3x markup to nearly zero with a $10-a-Month membership. * 2 hrs ago The AI industry has an expensive problem. Startups are now burning 40-50% of revenue just to keep the lights on for model inference, more than double what a typical SaaS company spends, and some companies are reportedly running through entire annual AI budgets months ahead of schedule. What was supposed to be the great equalizer of the tech industry has quietly become a toll road, and the bill is coming due across the board. Today, Pika, the Lightspeed-backed AI video company, is launching the Pika API Club to fix it. Built on the playbook that fixed retail, think Costco, for generative media, the membership gives builders direct access to over 70 of the world's leading generative AI models, including Pika's own, spanning video, image, sound, and language, all through a single API key, at prices as close to wholesale as Pika can get them. The Pika API Club is available starting today at dev.pika.art, with membership open to anyone at $10 a month. Court Term Reflects Reagan, Not Trump, Priorities The savings are steep. Seedance 2.0 runs up to 80% cheaper than Runway Dev, and up to 2x cheaper than Fal.ai. Kling 3.0 and GPT Image 2.0 both come in roughly 20% below Fal's pricing. Generating just three 15-second Seedance 2.0 videos, compared to Runway's pricing, already saves more than the entire monthly fee. A savings calculator launching on Pika's site lets builders plug in their own usage and see exactly what they'd save against other aggregators before they sign up. "Our developer and founder friends were shocked to hear that they've been paying a 3x markup on generative AI models," said Pika CEO Demi Guo. "We feel it's important to provide an API solution that's much more cost-efficient, especially for this next generation of builders and creators." The mechanism behind it is simple: taking less profit, cutting margin to almost zero to pass the savings straight through to members. The move puts pressure on every other aggregator in the space to match Pika's pricing or risk losing developers to it. What You Get * The world's best video, image, and sound models, one API. Over 70 leading models across video, image, sound, and language, including Pika's own, all from a single key. * Agent-native. Built to be legible to any agent or LLM, and usable directly inside any vibecoding platform. * Negotiated member benefits. Markup kept as low as possible so the savings pass straight to builders. Who This Is For * Indie developers, vibecoding anything from a recipe site to a virtual try-on app with multimodal gen AI * Designers, creating prototypes with working image and video generation * Creative agencies, integrating gen media into their internal creation tools * Startups, leveling up any product with multimodal gen AI at a lower cost "Pika is committed to making outstanding AI outputs more accessible to builders, makers, and creators of all kinds," the company said. "This carries through to our products, our own models, and our pricing. And this is just the beginning." Full pricing details available on request. About Pika Pika is an AI video company backed by Lightspeed, known for launching some of the most widely used generative video tools since its founding in 2023, including Pikaffects. The API Club marks its entry into developer infrastructure, giving builders wholesale-level access to the leading models across video, image, sound, and language, separate from the consumer app. For more information, visit [pika.art]. Media gallery
FreeLipSync vs Runway vs Pika: which AI video tool should you actually use in 2026? By Nina Brooks I've spent way too much time this year hopping between AI video tools, trying to figure out which one actually deserves a spot in my workflow. Runway and Pika get the most hype. But every time I compare them to FreeLipSync for lip sync work specifically, the answer keeps coming out the same. Let me break down exactly what each tool does, where it shines, and where it quietly lets you down. If you want cinematic video generation with camera motion and scene synthesis, Runway or Pika will impress you. If you want to make a photo or video speak - with any audio, in any language, at zero cost - FreeLipSync is the only tool that gives you that without a credit card or watermark. Before comparing prices, it's worth being honest about what each tool is built for. FreeLipSync is purpose-built for AI lip sync. You upload a face photo or video, provide audio (typed, uploaded, or voice-cloned), and it generates a realistic talking video. That's the entire use case - and it's extraordinarily good at it. Runway is a full-featured AI video studio. Gen-3 Alpha Turbo can generate entire video scenes from text prompts, extend clips, remove objects, apply motion effects. Lip sync is one feature among many, and it's geared toward professional post-production. Pika leans into character-driven animation. Its Pikaformance feature is impressive for turning images into expressive talking characters with emotional nuance. Great for creative content, less practical for corporate or educational use. These aren't the same tool. The question is which one matches your actual use case. | Tool | Free Tier | Cheapest Paid | | FreeLipSync | 20-sec videos, no watermark, no sign-up | $4.99/mo (Starter) | | Runway | 125 credits (~8 sec video), watermark | $12/mo (Standard) | | Pika | Limited free credits | ~$8/mo (Basic) | FreeLipSync's free tier is genuinely usable. No sign-up means you can generate your first video in under two minutes. No watermark means you can actually use it. The 20-second cap is a real limit, but for short social clips, announcements, or trying out a voice - it's plenty. Runway's free tier burns fast. At 125 credits, you're looking at maybe 8-10 seconds of generated video before you hit zero. Then it's $12/month minimum. Pika's Basic plan is affordable, but the free tier has become increasingly stingy with credits. If you're a solo creator trying to keep costs under $5/month, the decision is easy. I ran the same face photo through all three tools with identical audio. Here's what I found: FreeLipSync was the fastest - under 30 seconds - and the lip sync accuracy was genuinely impressive. The "Max" model adds more natural facial expressions and head movements. For a talking head video, this is production-quality. Runway produced a more cinematic result, but lip sync wasn't as tight. It's better suited to scripted video production where you're generating full scenes, not syncing a face to an existing voice. Pika (Pikaformance) delivered the most expressive character animation. If you're making a character talk with emotion - think animated storytelling - Pika is excellent. For a realistic human talking head, FreeLipSync wins on accuracy. FreeLipSync is right for you if: * You need to dub a photo or video in any language (500+ languages supported) * You want no sign-up friction and no watermark on short clips * You're a content creator, marketer, or educator making talking-head videos * Budget matters and you can't justify $12-30/month just for this one use case Runway is right for you if: * You need cinematic scene generation, not just lip sync * You're a video professional building full productions * You already pay for a creative suite and want AI embedded in a workflow Pika is right for you if: * You want expressive animated characters * You're making creative short-form content where emotional nuance matters more than strict realism I've seen a lot of "free AI tools" that are free in name only - watermarked, credit-capped, or gated behind a sign-up that feeds you into a sales funnel. FreeLipSync is genuinely different. The free tier is actually useful, which is rare. For most creators who need to make a talking video once a week or so, the free tier might be all you ever need. And if you need more - HD downloads, videos up to 60 minutes, voice cloning at scale - the Pro plan at $29.99/month is still substantially cheaper per video-second than Runway or HeyGen. Runway and Pika are impressive tools. But comparing them to FreeLipSync for lip sync work is like comparing a full recording studio to a great microphone. Both are good at what they do; only one is purpose-built for the thing you're actually trying to do. If you haven't tried FreeLipSync yet, go do it right now - no account needed: freelipsync.com