Infrastructure / Backend Engineer

Location

San Francisco Office (HQ)

Employment Type

Full time

Department

World Labs HQ

At World Labs, our mission is to revolutionize artificial intelligence by developing Large World Models — taking AI beyond language and 2D visuals into the realm of complex, embodied 3D environments. We’re building the infrastructure that allows AI to truly understand, simulate, and interact with the physical and digital worlds.

We’re looking for exceptional engineers who thrive at the intersection of distributed systems, scalability, and performance. As part of our Infrastructure and Backend Engineering team, you’ll design and operate systems that underpin our large-scale AI training and inference pipelines — ensuring our models can scale to world-sized data and computation challenges.

Overview

As an Infrastructure / Backend Engineer at World Labs, you’ll play a key role in architecting and scaling the systems that power our next-generation AI platforms. You’ll work closely with researchers and product engineers to design distributed systems, optimize performance bottlenecks, and ensure reliability at scale.

This role is ideal for someone passionate about low-level performance optimization, distributed database systems, and building infrastructure that drives frontier-scale AI research.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems that power modern AI products. This includes AI training, inference, and serving, as well as service and API infrastructure.
  

• Optimize performance bottlenecks to scale throughput and reliability by orders of magnitude.
  

• Define long-term technical direction and system evolution for core infrastructure components.
  

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, research, and systems teams to deliver scalable, resilient backend services.
  

• Dig deep into complex production issues across the stack, from networking to storage to orchestration.
  

• Contribute to system reliability through incident response, postmortems, and best practices.
  

Key Qualifications

• 4+ years of relevant industry experience, including 2+ years leading large-scale distributed systems or backend projects.
  

• Proven experience building and scaling distributed systems with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and observability.
  

• Strong foundation in a systems programming language (C++, Rust, or Go preferred).
  

• Familiarity with Linux systems, cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi, etc.).
  

• Experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines.
  

• Proficiency in monitoring and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.).
  

• Bonus: domain expertise in database systems, storage engines, query processing, or streaming data pipelines.
  

Who You Are

Fearless Builder: You thrive on architecting systems that scale and love tackling hard distributed systems problems.

Performance Obsessed: You think deeply about latency, throughput, and efficiency — and enjoy finding elegant solutions to complex bottlenecks.

Resilient Innovator: You’re driven to build reliable systems that enable world-changing AI research.

Mission-Aligned: You’re passionate about advancing spatially intelligent AI and want to work at the frontier of human–machine understanding.

Collaborative Engineer: You believe the best infrastructure is built with a team — not in isolation.

We’re hiring the brightest minds from around the globe to bring diverse perspectives to our mission. If you’re ready to build the systems that will power AI’s next leap — from understanding worlds to creating them — then World Labs is your launchpad.

Join us, and let’s make history together.