iOS Video Engineer

About Hook

Hook is a social music platform, backed by top-tier investors, building the next generation of music discovery, fan expression, and creator growth. We turn the songs people love into sounds they can play with — enabling fans and creators to reimagine music through intuitive, remix-friendly experiences with zero learning curve. By partnering directly with artists, labels, and rightsholders, Hook ensures music is discovered, shared, and expressed in ways that respect and reward the people behind it. At Hook, music isn’t just consumed — it’s experienced, expressed, and made personal.

Role Overview

We’re hiring an iOS Video Engineer to lead the development of Hook’s video effects pipeline and creative tooling. You’ll build the systems that power real-time previews, branded effects (color / duotone / halftone), visual templates, and final export of shareable Hook videos.

Your work will directly shape the creative experience for millions of users across the Hook app and exported content (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc.). This is a hands-on technical role ideal for someone who has built video or media-heavy applications and enjoys working at the intersection of performance, creative tooling, and delightful user experiences.

What You’ll Do

• Build Hook’s video effects engine using AVFoundation + Core Image for color grading, duotone, halftone, and branded visual treatments.

• Implement real-time filter previews in our creative studio, ensuring smooth performance and accurate rendering across devices.

• Process and export final Hook videos, combining audio and video into a unified asset that users can share on or off platform.

• Create reusable video editing utilities, including cropping, trimming, aspect ratio handling, overlays, transitions, and template-based compositions.

• Work closely with design & brand partners to translate After Effects concepts into performant mobile-friendly filters and animations.

• Optimize the entire media pipeline for performance, memory, and battery efficiency using Core Image, AVVideoComposition, and best-in-class concurrency.

• Help evolve Hook’s creative capabilities, enabling future features like templates, multi-layer compositions, and creator-driven video tools.

Required Skills & Experience

AVFoundation Expertise

• AVPlayer / AVQueuePlayer

• AVAssetExportSession for final renders

• AVMutableComposition & AVMutableVideoComposition

• AVAssetImageGenerator for thumbnails

• Experience building custom video editing or rendering pipelines

Core Image Proficiency

• CIFilters for real-time and offline effects

• Custom CI filter chains (color grading, stylization, halftone, duotone)

• Understanding of GPU-backed image processing and performance constraints

Video Editing Capabilities

• Experience building multi-track video compositions, including combining multiple video clips, images, overlays, and transitions.

• Ability to implement picture-in-picture, split-screen, and template-driven layouts.

• Strong understanding of timeline-based editing, including clip trimming, time ranges, alignment, and synchronized playback.

• Proficient with cropping, scaling, rotation, aspect ratio handling, and orientation transforms.

• Ability to build modular, reusable systems for applying visual templates and multi-layer compositions.

Performance & Concurrency

• Strong understanding of CVPixelBuffer lifecycles

• Performance tuning for real-time previews

• Modern Swift concurrency (async/await, actors)

• Knowledge of GPU vs CPU rendering trade-offs

iOS Engineering Fundamentals

• Swift, UIKit/SwiftUI

• Clean architectures, dependency injection, modular design

• Ability to ship reliable, high-performance features end to end

Nice to Have

These are not required for success but open doors to future growth in the role:

• Experience with Snap Lens Studio or similar real-time camera/effects tools

• Metal (custom shaders, GPU compute pipelines, advanced performance tuning)

• Vision Framework for person segmentation or background replacement

• CoreML integration for ML-driven enhancement or segmentation

• Experience building tools for short-form content, social media creation, or camera/video apps

• Experience on apps like TikTok, CapCut, VSCO, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, or other creative video tools

Who You Are

• You’ve built or deeply contributed to a video or creative-focused mobile product.

• You care about the craft of visual expression and smooth creative UX experiences.

• You enjoy both the technical depth (video pipelines, rendering, performance) and the creative output (effects, templates, transitions).

• You want to take ownership of a core part of a product used by artists, superfans, and creators.

Why This Role Is Exciting

• You’ll build the creative engine that powers Hook’s most visible features.

• You’ll shape a brand-new creative format used across TikTok, Reels, and the Hook community.

• You’ll work alongside a world-class design, engineering, and music team.

• You’ll join early and have meaningful ownership over a key part of the product.