Research Engineer

Roam; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free housing

Free food

Transportation support

Visa Sponsorship

Job summary

Roam is seeking talented engineers to work on AI-driven world generation and game development. This role focuses on building efficient pipelines for real-time generation and orchestration across 3D environments. Candidates should have a strong foundation in software engineering and experience with large-scale systems.

The position offers competitive compensation between $200,000 and $350,000, along with housing, food, and transportation benefits.

Qualifications

• Experience with reinforcement learning pipelines.
• Familiarity with game engines or simulation frameworks.
• Ability to switch between research and production systems.

Responsibilities

• Focus on world generation pipelines and optimization.
• Develop distributed multi-agent orchestration systems.
• Build adaptive game generation systems with dynamic difficulty.

Skills

Strong software fundamentals

Experience building large multimodal systems

Familiarity with distributed training

Generative vision experience (bonus)

Job description

About Roam

Roam is an Applied AI lab building World Models for highly retentive 3D environments. We're lifting models from the 2D plane of pixels into the full dimensionality of interactive worlds. Our work spans everything required to perceive, reason about, and create in 3D, with applications across simulation, design, and play.

Our first focus is gaming: 3D environment generation and understanding for interactive entertainment, technology that enables millions of people to explore, create, and share highly engaging worlds together.

Similar to how TikTok turned everyone into a creator through easy-to-use tools, we will let everyone turn their ideas into games without needing any technical skills.

Since founding earlier this year, we have:

• Locked in 1,000+ gaming & livestream creators (100 K–10 M followers each) who will launch Roam games to an aggregate reach of 250 M+ fans.
• Assembled a 12 person applied AI team spanning Ex-Moonshot (post-training & agents, diffusion model training), second-time technical founders, engineers that made 100+ games for Voodoo, Supersonic, Sidemen and built mobile apps from 0–2M DAUs.
• Raised an unannounced round from investors behind Google Deepmind, Bytedance, Anduril, Together AI and Polymarket, angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Deepmind, Cognition, & large content creators.
• Acquired a consumer product studio with 11.5M+ downloads.

About the Role

You’ll work at the intersection of applied AI and large-scale systems, focusing on world generation pipelines, data-efficient training methods, and inference-time optimization for real-time generation. Your work will enable everyone to make, play and monetize highly engaging games & 3D environments. Our current research spans:

• Distributed multi-agent orchestration systems for coordinated world synthesis, spanning terrain generation, asset population, and behavior trees.
• Reinforcement learning pipelines for adaptive, open-ended game generation with hierarchical action spaces and dynamic difficulty adjustment.
• Agentic codegen & diffusion-based tooling for creating studio-quality simulated environments.

We’re looking for engineers who have

• Strong software fundamentals and comfort switching between production systems and research.
• Experience building or training large multimodal or agentic systems.
• Familiarity with distributed training, data curation, or large-scale vision/3D pipelines at scale.
• Bonus: Have worked on generative vision, world models, or RL systems.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience training or fine-tuning diffusion or other generative vision models.
• Prior work in robotics, multi-agent systems, or simulation-based RL.
• Familiarity with game engines or 3D simulation frameworks as experimental testbeds.

Compensation

• Base salary of $200,000 – $350,000, + $165,750- $353,250 equity and benefits.
• Free housing, food, and transportation.
• Visa Sponsorship & relocation support.

Growth Opportunity

You’ll join a mission-driven team working at the frontier of AI world generation. We're HQ'd in SF and currently work in an intense 996. In this role, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Own large parts of Roam’s core generation and simulation stack spanning from multimodal data pipelines to agent orchestration and engagement modeling.
• Define new benchmarks for fun, retention, and interactive intelligence in 3D worlds using behavioral data across thousands of environments.
• Ship alongside a team that has already built products for 13M+ users, with 1000+ large creators ready to deploy our technology.

If you're excited to move fast, build at the edge of what's possible, and help define how AI inhabits 3D worlds, let's talk.