Member of Technical Staff (Infrastructure)

Astrocade•Palo Alto, CA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

Astrocade is an AI technology company building super-intelligence for the interactive world, delivered through a breakout consumer platform. Today's frontier models can write, reason, and generate video. None can build a world you can step into and act on. Interactive world models are one of the defining problems on the path to ASI, and the foundation of the next great consumer platform. Interactivity is the holy grail of content: not something you watch, but something that responds to you. We're further ahead than anyone: the only team building the intelligence and the platform together, and both are already live. Our social UGC platform lets anyone create and play interactive experiences through natural language. And it's one of the fastest-growing consumer products in the world, with over 30 million users in just months since launch. Creators bring to life games, companions that remember and grow with them, learning experiences that adapt like a great tutor, and social worlds built with friends. The platform also powers our research with data no video dataset contains: millions of creators prompting and refining gives us paired data of human intent and the worlds that fulfill it, and every play session produces ground-truth, action-labeled interaction data at scale. All of it flows back into our models, and research ships to real players in days, spinning a flywheel no one else can build. We are a small team from Google Research, Meta, FAIR, Character.ai , and Stanford, led alongside Fei-Fei Li, with frontier-scale compute and direct ownership of core model problems. We are backed by Sequoia Capital, Google, NVIDIA, and luminaries including Eric Schmidt and Jerry Yang. The next foundational AI company will be built where world models meet a billion players. We're the rare place where frontier research and a breakout consumer platform are one company, and where your work ships to millions, not to a paper. Come build it with us. About the Role The hardest part of what we're building isn't the games — it's the platform underneath them. We're serving millions of players, running agentic AI pipelines in real time, and building the recommendation systems that shape what people discover and play. As an Infrastructure MTS, you'll own the systems that make all of that work: reliable, cost-efficient, and fast at real scale. We benchmark everything. Quality of AI-generated games is our north-star metric, and infrastructure is what makes that metric possible to move.

Requirements

4–8+ years of infrastructure, platform, or systems engineering experience
Have designed and operated high-traffic serving systems — recommendations, content delivery, streaming, or similar
Think in systems: you ask "what breaks at 100x this load" before you ship, and you design for it
Have strong instincts around cost/performance tradeoffs and have made real calls in production environments
Are comfortable in Python-heavy backends and fluent across the infra stack

Nice To Haves

Experience at companies with large-scale recommendation or personalization infrastructure (YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Airbnb, Snap, Snowflake)
Background in agentic or LLM-integrated systems
Experience with 0→1 infrastructure builds or legacy-to-modern migrations
Observability and reliability engineering (you've been on-call and made systems better because of it)

Responsibilities

Design and build the infrastructure powering game creation, serving, and discovery at scale
Own cost optimization and compute efficiency — unit economics are a real constraint and we take them seriously
Build and maintain the agentic pipelines that take a creator's idea and produce a playable game
Develop and scale recommendation and personalization infrastructure — what gets shown, to whom, and when
Instrument systems deeply: structured logging, performance profiling, capacity planning
Help other engineers build on a platform that's reliable and fast to ship on

Benefits

Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and performance bonus.
100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and eligible dependents.
Flexible PTO and unlimited sick time.
$650/month AI Tools budget to use on the tools that help you do your best work.
$500/month Lifestyle Benefit for wellness, fitness, meals, house cleaning, and more.
$200/month Fun Benefit to spend on hobbies, travel, games, concerts, or whatever brings you joy.
Up to 16 weeks paid parental leave for birth parents and 12 weeks for non-birth parents, plus a $1,500/month childcare benefit.
$2,000 workspace setup allowance and $200/month commuter benefit.
Daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner on in-office days, plus regular team events and offsites.
401(k) retirement plan through Human Interest.