ML Engineer

Astrocade•Palo Alto, CA

1d•$200,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

Astrocade is an AI technology company building super-intelligence for the interactive world, delivered through a breakout consumer platform. Our social UGC platform lets anyone create and play interactive experiences through natural language. 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. Every experience on Astrocade starts as an idea from a creator. An agentic AI system turns that idea into something playable. How good that experience turns out to be is our north-star metric. Your job is to move that metric. As an ML Engineer on our AI team, you'll own how our creation system behaves, where it fails, and how it gets better. You'll dig into real creator sessions to find where generation breaks down, build the evals that tell us whether a change actually helped, and design the agentic systems behind the next version of creation on the platform. This is applied ML with a direct line to product. What you ship shows up in the games millions of players see. We're a small team of about 20 engineers, and nobody here stays in a lane. You'll work across models, agents, data pipelines, and infrastructure as the problem requires, and you'll collaborate directly with our CTO and co-founders.

Requirements

3–7+ years of experience in ML engineering or applied ML, with a track record of shipping models or AI systems to real users
Have built LLM-powered or agentic systems in production
Treat evals as a core part of the job: you've designed metrics and eval sets and know when a number is lying to you
Strong CS fundamentals and write clean, efficient code (Python-heavy)
Reason well about probability and statistics, and are comfortable being tested on it
Are a builder with high agency and a bias for action, and want to own outcomes rather than tickets
Have played with Astrocade and have opinions about what the content should be

Nice To Haves

Background in code generation, program synthesis, or LLM-for-code
Experience at a fast-moving AI startup, or on applied ML teams at large consumer companies
Interest in games, UGC, or creator platforms
Exposure to post-training or fine-tuning, and a sense of when it beats better prompting and orchestration

Responsibilities

Own the quality of AI-generated content end to end, including model behavior, agent orchestration, prompting, tool use, and the failure modes in between
Build evaluation and insight systems on production creator data that measure failure rates, quality, and where the system is strong or weak, and turn those findings into concrete improvements
Design and build agentic ML systems that take a creator's idea and reliably produce a great, playable game
Debug hard problems across the stack, from a bad generation down to the data, the model, or the pipeline that caused it
Run experiments quickly, measure rigorously, and ship what works
Help define how the AI team works as it grows, including tooling, eval standards, and technical direction

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.