Job Details

Applied Research Engineer
$200,000 to $350,000 + 0.5-1.5% Equity (up to $760k TC) + Free Housing, Food & Transportation
San Francisco, CA - In-Person

Are you an Applied AI Engineer who wants to build world models that turn ideas into interactive 3D games, working alongside a team shipping to 250M+ users whilst benefiting from founding-level equity and the chance to work with some of the brightest minds in the space?

This is an incredible opportunity to join a startup backed by the investors behind DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI, Polymarket and other leading companies, where you will work alongside former ByteDance researchers, Thiel Fellows, and previous founders who've built games with 13M+ downloads to create technology that makes everyone a game creator.

They are developing an AI platform that generates interactive 3D game worlds from text and images. Through cutting-edge world models, multi-agent orchestration, and diffusion-based generation, they're building the infrastructure that lets anyone create engaging games without coding in a similar manner to how TikTok democratized video creation.

As an Applied AI Engineer, you will design and ship multi-agent systems for coordinated world synthesis, build RL pipelines for adaptive game generation with dynamic difficulty adjustment, and develop agentic codegen tools that create studio-quality 3D environments. You'll optimize inference for real-time generation and define new benchmarks for interactive intelligence using behavioral data from thousands of environments.

This is a rare chance to join a well-funded startup with 1,000+ gaming creators ready to launch your work to massive audiences, in a role that lets you own core generation infrastructure whilst working in an intense, mission-driven team environment and benefiting from rapid career progression as the company scales.

The Role:

• Startup with 8-figure funding, $4M ARR, and 1,000+ creators with 250M+ aggregate reach
• Build distributed multi-agent orchestration systems for terrain generation, asset population, and behavior trees
• Design RL pipelines for open-ended game generation with hierarchical action spaces and engagement optimization
• Develop agentic codegen and diffusion-based tooling for creating interactive 3D environments at scale
• Optimize world generation pipelines for real-time inference across diverse hardware architectures
• Ship alongside a team that's already delivered 13M+ downloads with direct creator partnerships for immediate distribution
• Intense 996 work culture-fully committed team working in-person in SF with free housing/food/transportation

The Person:

• Strong software fundamentals with ability to toggle 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
• Bonus: Experience with generative vision, world models, RL systems, diffusion models, robotics, multi-agent systems, or game engines
• Comfortable in high-intensity, early-stage environment (996 work culture)

Rise Technical Recruitment Inc of 1011 Centre Rd, Suite 322, Wilmington, DE 19805 act as an employer-paid private personnel agency.

The salary advertised is the bracket available for this position. The actual salary paid will be dependent on your level of experience, qualifications and skill set and will be decided by our client, the employer. Rise are not responsible or liable for any hiring decisions made by the end client.

We are an equal opportunities company and welcome applications from all suitable candidates.