Member of Technical Staff (RecSys)

Astrocade is an AI technology company building super-intelligence for the interactive world delivered through a breakout consumer platform.

Todays 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. Were 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 its 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 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. Were 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

Our recommendation system doesnt exist yet and it needs to. We have a large and fast-growing catalog of games millions of users and new content being created every day. What you show someone and when is the difference between a session that lasts two minutes and one that lasts two hours. As our RecSys founding member youll own this problem end-to-end - set the architecture build the foundation and grow it from rule-based systems to deep learning. The decisions made now will shape how discovery works on the platform for years.

Youll report to the CTO and work directly with the co-founders. This is a 0 to 1 build with full ownership.

What Youll Do

• Design and build the systems that decide which games surface to which players from candidate retrieval through final ranking

• Own the full data pipeline - ingestion feature engineering training data construction and low-latency serving

• Build personalization systems and models that adapt to user behavior preferences and context over time

• Build eval infrastructure to measure recommendation quality: offline metrics online experiments and business outcomes

• Run A/B tests and translate results into concrete system improvements

• Instrument the recommendation stack deeply so the team can move fast with confidence

Youd Be a Great Fit If You:

• Have 4-7 years of experience in recommendation systems ML engineering or applied ML in a consumer context

• Have built ranking or personalization systems end-to-end - feeds video gaming or similar

• Experience running recommendation evals end-to-end (offline online)

• Understand the full stack - data pipelines feature stores model training and serving

• Are comfortable making architectural decisions on a greenfield system without much scaffolding

• Are self-directed and energized by ownership not just execution

Bonus Points

• Experience at companies with large-scale consumer recommendation systems (YouTube Netflix TikTok Instagram LinkedIn Twitter/X)

• Familiarity with both rule-based and deep learning approaches and when to use each

• Background in UGC or creator platforms where content is high-volume and fast-changing

• 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 $1500/month childcare benefit.

• $2000 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.
  

Join us to help build the future of interactive entertainment!

Required Experience:

Staff IC