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Member of Technical Staff (Infrastructure)

Astrocade astrocade.com Open · verified Oct 24, 2026
On-site Palo Alto Full-time Senior Software Engineering

At a glance

Senior Software Engineering role at Astrocade. Palo Alto · full-time · $165,000–$250,000 base.

SalaryStated by Astrocade
$165,000 – $250,000
Base salary for this role, in USD per year, as published in the posting.
This role, from AstrocadeOur estimate for the market: $200,000–$250,000Median $220,925
The range includes the market median of $220,925 for senior software engineering roles in Palo Alto.
Worked out from 30 postings that stated pay, median $220,925. Last updated Oct 16, 2026.
RoleSoftware Engineering
SenioritySenior
LocationPalo Alto
WorkplaceOn-site
EmploymentFull-time
Base pay$165,000–$250,000
PostedApr 5, 2026 · 6mo ago
Role brief

techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.

What you'll do

  • Build the infrastructure behind game creation, delivery and discovery, keeping it reliable, efficient and responsive at scale
  • Improve compute efficiency and operating costs, treating the economics of each unit as a practical constraint
  • Maintain the AI workflows that turn creator prompts into playable games
  • Scale recommendation systems that decide what content reaches each player and when
  • Add logging, performance analysis and capacity planning, then help engineers ship on a dependable platform

What you bring

  • At least four years in infrastructure, platform or systems engineering
  • You have designed and run high-traffic serving systems, such as recommendations, content delivery or streaming
  • You make production decisions that balance cost and performance, and plan systems for much higher loads
  • You are comfortable building Python-heavy backends and working across infrastructure systems

Who this fits

This senior infrastructure role suits an experienced engineer who enjoys operating high-traffic systems and making cost-versus-performance calls. The position is onsite in Palo Alto.

From the employer

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, 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

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)

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!

Opportunity

Software Engineering work from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Upwork, in one list.

Each morning you get everything that fits, strongest first.

Software Engineering$160k+

Find me work

By the team behind techroles.

Find me work
Opportunity

Software Engineering work from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Upwork, in one list.

Each morning you get everything that fits, strongest first.

Find me work

By the team behind techroles.