Member of Technical Staff (RecSys)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Competitive base + equity + bonus

Lunch provided daily

Job summary

Astrocade in Palo Alto seeks a founding member for their recommendation system focusing on game discovery. You will design the systems that surface games to users, manage the entire data pipeline, and develop personalization models that evolve with user behavior. Ideal candidates have 4-7+ years in recommendation systems or ML engineering. The role offers competitive base salary, equity, and daily lunches as benefits. Join us and shape the future of interactive entertainment.

Qualifications

• 4-7+ years of experience in recommendation systems, ML engineering, or applied ML.
• Experience in building ranking or personalization systems end-to-end.
• Familiarity with architectural decisions for new systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the systems for game recommendations.
• Own the full data pipeline: ingestion, feature engineering, and serving.
• Build personalization systems that adapt to user behavior.

Skills

Experience in recommendation systems

ML engineering

Data pipelines

Personalization systems

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

Our recommendation system doesn't 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, you'll 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.

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

What You’ll 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

You’d 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

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive base + equity + bonus
• Health, dental, and vision coverage
• Lunch provided daily

Join us to help build the future of interactive entertainment.