We build foundational world models that can perceive, generate, reason, and interact with the 3D world — unlocking AI's full potential through spatial intelligence by transforming seeing into doing, perceiving into reasoning, and imagining into creating.
We believe spatial intelligence will unlock new forms of storytelling, creativity, design, simulation, and immersive experiences across both virtual and physical worlds.
We bring together a world-class team, united by a shared curiosity, passion, and deep backgrounds in technology — from AI research to systems engineering to product design — creating a tight feedback loop between our cutting-edge research and products that empower our users.
Role Overview
We are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to own Developer Infrastructure at World Labs.
This is a high impact systems role focused on build systems, testing infrastructure, and release and rollout pipelines, the critical path that determines how code moves from local development to production.
You will define and operate the systems that make our engineering organization fast, reliable, and scalable, in an environment where both the codebase and workloads are evolving quickly.
You will be responsible for the architecture and operation of the systems that power developer velocity and production safety, making foundational decisions around build performance, dependency structure, test execution, and release reliability.
This role is about turning complex, failure prone workflows into systems that are fast, correct, and reproducible, and setting the technical direction for how we build and ship software.
This is a hands on role. You will design, build, and operate these systems directly.
What You Will Do:- Own the design and evolution of the build, test, and release systems that power the platform.
- Define architecture for a Bazel based monorepo, including performance, caching, and dependency graph scalability.
- Improve build performance and correctness, including incremental builds, caching strategies, and graph optimization.
- Design and operate test infrastructure, focusing on reliability, isolation, and signal quality.
- Build and improve release and rollout systems, including deployment pipelines, canarying, and rollback.
- Improve end to end developer velocity, from local iteration to production deployment.
- Debug and resolve complex issues across the pipeline, including build failures, dependency issues, test flakiness, and release regressions.
- Establish standards for reproducibility, observability, and operability across build and release systems.
- Identify and eliminate systemic failure modes across the development lifecycle.
- Contribute broadly across infrastructure and reliability work when needed.
- Mentor engineers and raise the bar for system design and technical decision making.
- 5-10 years of experience building and operating production systems at scale, with ownership of critical infrastructure.
- Strong experience with build systems and dependency graphs such as Bazel, Buck, Pants, or similar, or the ability to quickly ramp on Bazel in a large monorepo environment.
- Experience designing and improving build, test, and release pipelines, with a focus on performance, correctness, and reproducibility.
- Strong systems understanding of how code moves from source to build to test to production.
- Hands on experience debugging complex system issues, including build failures, dependency issues, test flakiness, and release regressions.
- Experience owning systems with strict reliability and performance requirements.
- Strong proficiency in at least one of Python, Go, or Rust, with a strong preference for Python
- Comfort working across languages in a polyglot codebase.
- Proven ability to define architecture and drive technical decisions end to end.
- Strong judgment in balancing developer velocity, system complexity, and reliability.
- Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast moving environments with high ownership.
- You have worked on systems where build performance, correctness, and reproducibility were first order concerns, not afterthoughts.
- Deep experience with Bazel at scale, including remote caching, remote execution, and build graph optimization.
- Experience designing hermetic and reproducible build systems.
- Experience improving test infrastructure at scale, including eliminating flakiness and improving signal quality.
- Experience building or operating release and rollout systems, including canarying, staged rollouts, and rollback mechanisms.
- Experience instrumenting systems for observability and debugging of build, test, and release pipelines.
- Experience in early stage or high growth environments.
- Fearless Innovator: We need people who thrive on challenges and aren't afraid to tackle the impossible.
- Resilient Builder: Impacting Large World Models isn't a sprint; it's a marathon with hurdles. We're looking for builders who can weather the storms of groundbreaking research and come out stronger.
- Mission-Driven Mindset: Everything we do is in service of creating the best spatially intelligent AI systems, and using them to empower people.
- Collaborative Spirit: We're building something bigger than any one person. We need team players who can harness the power of collective intelligence.
We're hiring the brightest minds from around the globe to bring diverse perspectives to our cutting-edge work. If you're ready to work on technology that will reshape how machines perceive and interact with the world, World Labs is your launchpad.
Join us, and let's make history together.
Equal Opportunity & Pay TransparencyEqual Employment Opportunity
World Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. We welcome all qualified applicants and are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process upon request.
California Pay Transparency
In accordance with California law, we disclose the following:
Pay Range
$200-$300k base salary (good-faith estimate for San Francisco Bay Area upon hire; actual offer based on experience, skills, and qualifications)
Total Compensation
Base salary plus equity awards and annual performance bonus
Salary History
We do not request or consider prior compensation in making offers
Compliance: Cal. Lab. Code §432.3 (pay scale disclosure & salary history ban); Cal. Lab. Code §1197.5 (Equal Pay Act); Cal. Gov. Code §12940 (FEHA); 42 U.S.C. §2000e (Title VII); 29 U.S.C. §621 (ADEA); 42 U.S.C. §12101 (ADA)
What We Do
World Labs is a spatial intelligence company building Large World Models (LWMs) to perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world. We aim to lift AI models from the 2D plane of pixels to full 3D worlds – both virtual and real – endowing them with spatial intelligence as rich as our own. We believe that humans are innovative, curious, and creative; science and technology are both manifestations and drivers of these impulses. Propelling AI forward with spatial intelligence will also propel forward both individuals and humanity as a whole. Toward this goal, World Labs will develop spatially intelligent LWMs that can understand and reason about the 3D world from images and other modalities. Over time, we expect to train increasingly powerful models with broader capabilities that can be applied in a variety of domains, working alongside people. These are ambitious goals, so we are building an ambitious company to tackle them. Our team, led by co-founders Fei-Fei Li, PhD; Justin Johnson, PhD; Christoph Lassner, PhD; and Ben Mildenhall, PhD, has a strong research background, but we are not motivated by exploration for its own sake. Instead, we believe that now is a unique moment where rapid scientific progress has thinned the barrier between research and applications. We aim to seize this opportunity, focusing on the entire throughline from research to engineering to product to people. We are bringing together the most formidable slate of pixel talent ever assembled, creating a tight feedback loop between our spatially intelligent foundation models and products that will empower our users. We invite you to learn more about joining our fast-growing team. You can find open positions at jobs.ashbyhq.com/worldlabs.
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