S:23 Recruitment

S23 - AI

Senior Software Engineer: Data Platform

Location: On-site, Los Angeles, CA

Salary: $130,000 - $200,000 Base + Competitive Equity

About the Role

A fast-scaling, VC-backed startup is building the data infrastructure for world-model AI, sitting at the intersection of gaming and AI. The company acquires, captures, enriches, packages, and delivers premium, rights-cleared multimodal data from game worlds, helping game studios unlock a new revenue stream while giving AI labs the high-fidelity data they need to train world models and robotics systems.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to take ownership across the data platform, from high-throughput video processing pipelines through to the customer-facing marketplace where AI labs discover and purchase datasets. This is a hands-on, full-stack role at a 15-person team where every engineer shapes the product directly and reports straight to the founding CTO.

Key Responsibilities

• Build high-throughput video processing pipelines, including transcoding, HLS packaging, depth-map rendering, frame-accurate synchronization, and GPU-accelerated media workflows at scale
• Own ingestion and processing pipelines for video, 3D assets, depth maps, telemetry, annotations, metadata, and model-generated signals
• Design and build event-driven workloads on Kafka and Kubernetes that move data through capture, processing, enrichment, QA, packaging, and delivery
• Build AI enrichment systems for scoring, metadata extraction, classification, quality review, redundancy detection, and dataset recommendations
• Build internal applications for capture teams, reviewers, operators, and data managers to track, inspect, improve, and assemble datasets
• Build customer-facing marketplace tools where AI labs can search, preview, evaluate, query, purchase, and receive datasets
• Design the data models behind provenance, asset versioning, licensing state, QA state, delivery history, analytics, and customer entitlements
• Build monitoring and analytics to understand quality, throughput, bottlenecks, customer behavior, and dataset value

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building production software across backend, frontend, and data-heavy systems
• Deep experience with video processing pipelines, signal processing at scale, and microservices architecture
• Comfortable building your own solutions rather than relying on off-the-shelf tools, and leveraging AI to accelerate your work
• Thrive in a fast-paced startup where you'll touch nearly every part of the stack
• Bonus points for ML experience or prior work at an AI training data platform (e.g. Scale AI, Mercor, Surge AI, Appen)

Why Join?

• Join a fast-scaling, well-backed startup (Lightspeed Ventures, SV Angel, Eniac Ventures) building an entirely new category: the data economy for Artificial World Intelligence
• Major ownership across the core platform, reporting directly to the founding CTO
• Work across the full stack, from GPU-accelerated media pipelines to AI enrichment to customer-facing marketplace tools
• Join a founding team with backgrounds from Twitch, Amazon, AI, and the video game industry
• Competitive salary plus equity
• On-site in Los Angeles, with flexibility for exceptional candidates who need up to a month to relocate