Founding AI Systems Engineer

One of our gaming startup clients is building an autonomous, multi‑modal storytelling engine — think Westworld‑style characters, dynamic worlds, and real‑time narrative generation delivered as a mobile entertainment product. Users can create or enter story worlds, make choices, speak to characters, and watch the world respond with AI‑generated images, video, voice, and plot twists. Working prototypes exist; now the challenge is scaling the system so it can generate full 3–4 minute “episodes” on demand.
Your day‑to‑day is owning the pipelines that make this possible. You’ll orchestrate “everything models” (LLM, image, video, voice, music), manage world and story context, build long‑running state machines, and ensure the system can one‑shot entire episodes without human intervention. You’ll take over the multi‑modal pipeline work from the current LLM engineer, split workstreams, and define the architecture that gets this product from prototype to production. This is a founding‑level role where you lead projects, make architectural decisions, and bring taste, judgment, and speed to a passionate SF team.

We are a company committed to creating diverse and inclusive environments where people can bring their full, authentic selves to work every day. We are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer that believes everyone matters. Qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment regardless of their race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, national origin, ancestry, genetic factors, age, disability, protected veteran status, military or uniformed service member status, or any other status or characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please send a request to HR@insightglobal.com.To learn more about how we collect, keep, and process your private information, please review Insight Global's Workforce Privacy Policy: https://insightglobal.com/workforce-privacy-policy/.

• Shipped multi‑service AI pipelines (LLM + image + video + voice + music) in production
• End‑to‑end ownership of complex systems (architecture → deployment → debugging → iteration)
• Strong Python; comfortable with TypeScript/React for integration
• Experience with workflow orchestration (state machines, queues, long‑running jobs, resumability)
• Reliability engineering (retries, circuit breakers, idempotency, checkpointing, partial failure recovery)
• Evaluation systems (LLM‑as‑judge, regression testing, quality gating, sampling)
• Cost + latency optimization across multi‑model pipelines
• Startup‑native: proactive, self‑directed, comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration
Strong GitHub or side projects showing passion for AI systems

• Multi‑agent systems Experience designing agents that coordinate tasks, pass context, call tools, or manage long‑running goals (e.g., planning agents, character agents, workflow agents). Ideally: built agents that maintain memory, world state, or persona consistency.
• Narrative / character AI systems Built systems for interactive storytelling, character simulation, branching narratives, or game‑like experiences where AI drives plot, tone, or dialogue.
• Emotional‑tone or voice‑tone modeling Worked with voice models that detect tone, emotion, or intent — or built pipelines that adapt narrative/character behavior based on user tone.
• Self‑hosted model deployment or GPU infrastructure Experience running models on owned GPU clusters, optimizing inference, managing scaling, or deploying custom model variants.
• Fine‑tuning or training workflows Hands‑on experience fine‑tuning LLMs or diffusion/video models, managing datasets, evaluating checkpoints, and shipping tuned models into production.
• Mobile‑first AI experiences Built AI systems that run efficiently on mobile clients or mobile‑first products (latency, caching, streaming constraints).
• Game engine or world‑building experience Worked with Unity/Unreal or custom engines to generate scenes, environments, or cut‑scenes — or built systems that maintain world rules and continuity.
• Experience at Character.ai, Polybuzz, Inworld, Runway, or similar Exposure to high‑scale, multi‑modal, or agentic AI products.

Benefit packages for this role will start on the 1st day of employment and include medical, dental, and vision insurance, as well as HSA, FSA, and DCFSA account options, and 401k retirement account access with employer matching. Employees in this role are also entitled to paid sick leave and/or other paid time off as provided by applicable law.