Astrocade

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 data infrastructure needs to be built, from scratch. We’re migrating off a custom in‑house pipeline that can’t keep up with our growth, and the decisions made now will shape how product, growth, and ML operate for years. As our first Data Engineer, you’ll own the architecture, build the pipelines, and lay the foundation everything else runs on.

You’ll sit in engineering, report to the CTO, and work directly with the co‑founders. This is a 0→1 build with full ownership.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain scalable pipelines for high‑volume user and game event data across ingestion, transformation, and serving
• Design the data models and warehouse structure that product, growth, and future ML systems depend on
• Write and optimize SQL queries - profiling, tuning, and setting the performance standard
• Own data quality from day one: monitoring, alerting, and anomaly detection
• Build toward a self‑serve analytics layer that non‑engineers can trust and use independently
• Instrument systems deeply: structured logging, performance profiling, latency awareness across the stack

You’d Be a Great Fit If You:

• Have 4‑7 years of data engineering experience, including at least one 0→1 build or major pipeline rebuild
• Have migrated or replaced production pipelines without dropping data or breaking downstream consumers
• Understand latency tradeoffs - you know when milliseconds matter and when daily batches are fine
• Have enough analytical range to serve product and growth teams directly, not just build pipes they can’t use
• Are self‑directed and comfortable making architectural decisions without a complete spec

Bonus Points

• Experience with high‑volume event data from consumer, social, or UGC platforms
• Background supporting ML feature pipelines or training data infrastructure
• Prior experience as the first or only data engineer at a startup
• Familiarity with monetization or ads data infrastructure
• Experience with dbt, Airflow, or Dagster

Compensation & Benefits

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

Join us to help build the future of interactive entertainment!