Astrocade jobs, judged for you, free

What they do

Astrocade runs a platform where anyone can create, share, and play casual games without code or downloads. A creator describes an idea in plain language, and an AI system turns it into a playable game. Creators earn money based on plays. Astrocade says the platform has more than 30 million users. Play data goes back into its AI models.

What they value

• High agency: see what must happen and make it happen, without a spec.
• First principles: reason from fundamentals, not playbooks.
• Owners: take a problem from idea to shipped to measured.
• Fast and focused: ship, learn, and iterate.
• People of taste: know what good feels like and hold the work to it.
• One team: honest, humble, and direct, with users above egos.

Where they hire

All eight open roles are in Palo Alto, California. Six are on-site. The Product Engineer and ML Engineer roles are hybrid, and the Product Engineer posting asks for four days a week in the office. The postings say nothing about visa sponsorship or the right to work.

Teams and roles

The board is small. Five roles are in engineering, two are in growth, and one is in product. Every posting states a salary range and offers equity.

• Frontend: a Member of Technical Staff who owns the screens where people create and play games. The work is in React and TypeScript.
• Infrastructure: a Member of Technical Staff who builds the systems that create, serve, and recommend games. The role also owns compute cost.
• Recommendations: a founding Member of Technical Staff who builds the recommendation system from nothing, from rule-based systems to deep learning. The role reports to the CTO.
• AI: an ML Engineer who owns the quality of AI-generated games. The work is evals on creator data and agentic systems that turn an idea into a game.
• Product engineering: a Product Engineer who decides what to build, ships it in React and TypeScript, and runs A/B tests.
• Growth: a Growth Marketing role that owns paid media, SEO, PR, and social. A second Growth role tests content on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and X.
• Product: a Product Growth role that owns experiments and metrics for creators and players.

The ML Engineer posting says that the team has about 20 engineers and that people work across models, agents, data pipelines, and infrastructure. A standing entry takes applications from people who see no role that fits.

What they look for

Most postings ask for self-directed people who own a problem from idea to measured result. Experience with consumer products repeats across the board. The frontend and Product Engineer postings name a scale of tens of millions of users. The years differ by role: seven or more for frontend, four to eight for infrastructure, four to seven for recommendations, three to seven for ML, and two or more for the Product Engineer. The infrastructure and ML roles are Python-heavy.

Several postings ask candidates to use or build agentic tools that automate their own work. Growth and product roles ask for fluency with data, experiments, and analytics. Most postings list experience at a creator platform or a two-sided platform as a bonus. The ML Engineer posting wants candidates who played with Astrocade and hold opinions about its content. It also says that candidates are tested on probability and statistics. Three postings say that candidates who do not meet every qualification can still apply. The postings do not describe the interview steps.