Senior Software Engineer: Data Platform

About the role

This role is being recruited by CoffeeSpace on behalf of an anonymous AI and gaming data infrastructure startup. The company is building the data infrastructure for world-model AI, working at the intersection of gaming and AI to provide premium rights-cleared multimodal data from game worlds for AI training.

Location: Los Angeles, California, United States

Compensation: $130K - $200K base + competitive equity

Employment type: Full-time

Visa: Visa sponsorship not available. May consider for truly exceptional candidates on a case-by-case basis, but candidates should not require sponsorship.

About the company

This startup collaborates with game studios to help them unlock new revenue streams by providing their game data to AI companies for pre-training world models, robotics systems, and more. Backed by Lightspeed Ventures and SV Angel, the company recently closed a $6M seed round and is scaling rapidly. The team is around 15 people today.

The company builds custom tooling in-house, focusing on video processing, signal processing, and enrichment, without relying on off-the-shelf solutions. The engineering culture is AI-native, offering unlimited AI tool credits and encouraging automation of repetitive processes.

About the role

You will be responsible for building high-throughput video processing pipelines, designing event-driven workloads on Kafka and Kubernetes, and developing AI enrichment systems. The role involves taking ownership of ingestion and processing pipelines and building internal applications for various teams.

You will work directly with the founding CTO, shaping the core platform and having major ownership across the entire product. The role offers the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies at the intersection of AI and gaming.

What You'll Do

Build video processing pipelines including transcoding, HLS packaging, and GPU-accelerated workflows

Design and build event-driven workloads on Kafka and Kubernetes

Develop AI enrichment systems for scoring, metadata extraction, and dataset recommendations

Create internal applications for capture teams and data managers

Design data models for provenance, asset versioning, and analytics

Build monitoring and analytics to understand quality, throughput, and customer behavior

Why This Role Is Compelling

Direct report to the founding CTO with significant ownership

Opportunity to shape the data infrastructure for world-model AI

Work on a stable product entering its next growth phase

AI-native engineering culture with unlimited AI credits

Build proprietary systems without vendor lock-in

Competitive equity with meaningful upside

The Ideal Candidate

5+ years of experience in building production software across backend, frontend, and data-heavy systems

Deep experience with video processing pipelines, signal processing, and microservices architecture

Comfortable building custom solutions and leveraging AI

Bonus if you have ML experience or have worked at an AI training data platform

This Role Is NOT For You If

You prefer using off-the-shelf tools over building custom solutions

You require new visa sponsorship

You are not able to work on-site in Los Angeles

Next steps

Apply via this LinkedIn job post

We’ll review and reach out if there’s a strong match

If aligned, we’ll introduce you directly to the team

If this role isn’t the right fit, we may suggest and make introductions to other high-signal startup roles we’re recruiting for, always with your permission.

A quick note on authenticity

This is a real, active role that CoffeeSpace is recruiting for in close partnership with the hiring team. We don’t post speculative roles and work directly with teams on their actual hiring needs.