Product Lead, World-Building

Origin Lab; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Origin Lab in Los Angeles is seeking a Senior Product Manager to own Reference Worlds from concept to live production. You will lead the cross-functional effort with engineering, research, and partnerships to deliver measurable, rights-cleared training worlds.

You’ll translate lab requirements into concrete world specs, design the creator economy, and ensure deliverables are tracked and delivered to labs on spec.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management, technical design, or production on game tools, UGC platforms, or simulation.
• Shipped worlds or creator tools on a major game engine or UGC platform.
• Built or run a creator program, contributor economy, or live community with payouts.

Responsibilities

• Own Reference Worlds end to end: what we build, order, and how we measure success.
• Turn lab requirements into world specs: scenes, actions, edge cases, conditions.
• Run builds with AI and in-engine tools to speed up production.
• Design the contributor side: bounties, paid play sessions, and creator payouts with clear rights.
• Collaborate with capture and research teams to produce usable data.
• Join lab conversations with the CEO and plan the next build.

Skills

Product management

Technical design

Game tools

UGC platforms

Generative AI

Education

Bachelor’s degree or higher

Tools

Procedural content tools

In-game tooling

Job description

AI learned language. Now it needs to learn worlds. Origin Lab builds the data infrastructure for that shift: premium, rights-cleared multimodal data from game engines and 3D worlds, for the AI labs training world models. Licensed at the source. Structured for learning. Delivered with full provenance.

Backed by Lightspeed, SV Angel, and a deep bench of Silicon Valley investors and operators, including the founders of Twitch and Cruise. Small team. Moving fast. Every person shapes the business directly.

The role

Most of our data comes from licensed games, captured with our publisher partners. Reference Worlds adds something new: environments we build ourselves, designed from the first asset to be measured, so a lab can ask for the exact scenes, actions, and conditions its model needs and get them with every right cleared.

You’ll lead it. That means three things: how worlds get made (generative AI and procedural tools, alongside our engineering team), how a community of builders and players contributes to them and gets paid, and how everything that comes out is captured, measured, and delivered to a lab's spec.

Worlds have to be good enough that people want to build and play in them, and controlled enough that every frame is useful training data. We want someone who has felt both pulls and enjoys holding them at once. You’ll be the first person on the team, work directly with our CEO and CTO, and build the team as it grows.

What you’ll do

• Own Reference Worlds end to end: what we build, in what order, and how we know it worked
• Turn lab requirements into world specs: the scenes, actions, edge cases, and conditions a model needs, including the dull ones nobody would put in a game (a door opened forty different ways, a crowd crossing a street in the rain)
• Run the build with our engineering team, using generative AI and in-engine procedural tools to make worlds faster than a traditional pipeline allows
• Design the contributor side: bounties, paid play sessions, and creator payouts, with clean rights on every contribution from the first upload
• Work with our capture and research teams so every world produces data that is measured, structured, and ready to deliver
• Join lab conversations with our CEO and come back with what to build next
• Hire the engineers and community lead who join you

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years in product management, technical design, or production on game tools, UGC platforms, or simulation
• You’ve shipped worlds or creator tools on a major game engine or UGC platform
• You’ve built or run a creator program, contributor economy, or live community, including how people get paid
• Hands-on with generative AI and procedural content tools, with a clear view of where they work today and where they break
• Comfortable with the rights side: contributor terms, licensing, and what makes content clean to train on
• Uses AI tools every day, including coding assistants for prototypes and scripts
• A clear writer who can turn a lab’s request into a spec a builder can follow
• Based in Los Angeles, or willing to relocate, and excited to work with the team in person

Nice to have

• Simulation for AI, robotics, or autonomous driving (CARLA, Isaac Sim, Omniverse, or similar)
• Familiarity with world models, video models, or ML training data
• A background in procedural generation, technical art, or level design
• You’ve shipped a game, mod, or experience with a real player base