Astrocade is a Los Altos, CA–based games creation platform that uses generative AI to enable users to create, play, and share video games and digital experiences.
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 http://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 Our data infrastructure needs to be built, from scratch. We’re migrating off a custom in-house pipeline that can’t keep up with our growth, and the decisions made now will shape how product, growth, and ML operate for years. As our first Data Engineer, you’ll own the architecture, build the pipelines, and lay the foundation everything else runs on. You’ll sit in engineering, report to the CTO, and work directly with the co-founders. This is a 0→1 build with full ownership. What You’ll Do - Build and maintain scalable pipelines for high-volume user and game event data across ingestion, transformation, and serving - Design the data models and warehouse structure that product, growth, and future ML systems depend on - Write and optimize SQL queries - profiling, tuning, and setting the performance standard - Own data quality from day one: monitoring, alerting, and anomaly detection - Build toward a self-serve analytics layer that non-engineers can trust and use independently - Instrument systems deeply: structured logging, performance profiling, latency awareness across the stack You’d Be a Great Fit If You: - Have 4-7 years of data engineering experience, including at least one 0→1 build or major pipeline rebuild - Have migrated or replaced production pipelines without dropping data or breaking downstream consumers - Understand latency tradeoffs - you know when milliseconds matter and when daily batches are fine - Have enough analytical range to serve product and growth teams directly, not just build pipes they can’t use - Are self-directed and comfortable making architectural decisions without a complete spec Bonus Points - Experience with high-volume event data from consumer, social, or UGC platforms - Background supporting ML feature pipelines or training data infrastructure - Prior experience as the first or only data engineer at a startup - Familiarity with monetization or ads data infrastructure - Experience with dbt, Airflow, or Dagster WHAT WE OFFER - 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. Join us to help build the future of interactive entertainment!