Member of Technical Staff (Infrastructure)

Astrocade; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base + equity

Health/dental/vision coverage

Lunch provided daily

Job summary

Astrocade, located in Palo Alto, CA, seeks an Infrastructure MTS to design and build the infrastructure powering game creation and discovery. The ideal candidate has 4-8+ years of systems engineering experience, skilled in optimizing costs and creating high-traffic serving systems. Responsibilities include developing recommendation systems and maintaining performance across the infrastructure. Competitive salary with equity, health benefits, and lunch provided daily are included in the compensation package. Join us to innovate in interactive entertainment.

Qualifications

• 4-8+ years of infrastructure, platform, or systems engineering experience.
• Experience designing and operating high-traffic serving systems.
• Strong instincts around cost/performance tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the infrastructure powering game creation.
• Own cost optimization and compute efficiency.
• Develop and scale recommendation and personalization infrastructure.

Skills

Infrastructure engineering

Systems engineering

Cost optimization

Python

Job description

About Astrocade

Astrocade is a UGC gaming platform where anyone can turn an idea into a playable, shareable game in days, not months. Think YouTube, but for games. We’ve grown to more than 20 million users within just a few months of launch, and we’re only getting started. Backed by Sequoia, NVIDIA, and Google, Astrocade was founded by Amir Sadeghian (Stanford PhD), Ali Sadeghian (Ex-Google Research), and Fei‑Fei Li (Godmother of AI). We’re building the infrastructure for a new era of interactive entertainment.

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.

What You’ll Do

• 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

You'd Be a Great Fit If You:

• Have 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

Bonus Points

• 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)

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive base + equity
• Health/dental/vision coverage
• Lunch provided daily

Join us to help build the future of interactive entertainment!