---
title: 'Senior Product Engineer (Tech Lead) at World Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-engineer-tech-lead-world-labs-san-francisco-tdya350kb5fa'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Senior Product Engineer (Tech Lead) at World Labs

- **Company:** World Labs
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Posted:** 2025-12-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/worldlabs/jobs/4089337009

## Job description

## About World Labs

[World Labs](https://www.worldlabs.ai/) is a frontier AI research and product company advancing spatial intelligence, the next frontier beyond large language models. Co-founded by [Dr. Fei-Fei Li](https://profiles.stanford.edu/fei-fei-li), [Justin Johnson](https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-johnson-41b43664/) and [Ben Mildenhall](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mildenhall-86b4739b/), the company is pioneering world models that perceive, generate, reason, and interact with virtual and physical worlds.

The company’s flagship product, [Marble](https://marble.worldlabs.ai/), transforms text, images, and video into fully navigable 3D worlds, unlocking applications across gaming, film, architecture, robotics, and immersive digital experiences. Backed by leading investors and with over $1B raised, World Labs is assembling a world-class team at the intersection of AI research and real-world deployment.

## Role Overview

We’re looking for a Senior Product Engineer who thrives at the intersection of product and engineering. You should have strong coding skills across the stack, a deep appreciation for intuitive user experiences, and the technical expertise to design end-to-end systems. In this role, you’ll own product features end-to-end—from ideation through to building responsive, user-centric web apps and backend services. Serving as a "player-coach," you will act as the engineering counterpart to product management to help with technical roadmapping and sprint execution. You will bring crucial software engineering and technical leadership experience to support a highly talented product team that currently leans heavily on design.

## What You Will Do

- Partner directly with product leadership on architectural decisions, sprint planning and technical execution.
- Ship focused, user-facing applications and developer tooling end-to-end, owning frontend, backend, and workflow design.
- Design and build complex workflows around generative models: chained and parallel generation calls, long-running async operations, streaming results, caching, retries, and graceful degradation around inference that takes seconds to minutes.
- Own the deliverable: you set and hold the quality bar for what ships under your name - correctness, performance, polish, and maintainability - and you review others' work to the same standard.
- Work directly with users and design partners; instrument what you ship, watch it get used, and iterate fast.

## Key Qualifications

- 6+ years of software engineering experience (8+ for Staff), with a track record of end-to-end ownership. You've shipped user-facing products, not just components of them, and you've been accountable for their quality in production.
- Deep proficiency in modern web application technologies for the frontend (e.g., TypeScript, React) and backend services, with a strong understanding of web architecture; especially in interactive and real-time applications with performance considerations.
- Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows, grounded in fundamentals strong enough to verify, correct, and own everything you ship — you use the tools to move faster, not to outsource judgment.
- Experience building products on top of asynchronous, long-latency, or streaming APIs.
- A product-minded approach: you form opinions about what users need, validate them cheaply, and change course on evidence.
- Excellent problem-solving abilities and a strong foundation in computer science principles.

## Preferred Qualifications

While not required, experience in one or more of the following is a strong plus:

- Experience in 3D graphics programming and shader development, particularly web frameworks such as WebGL and three.js.
- Experience building applications around generative image, video, or 3D AI models.
- Contributions to open-source graphics or machine learning projects.
- Experience working in VFX, gaming, 3D design, or other industries that focus on high-fidelity visual outputs.

## Who You Are

- 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 Transparency

## Equal 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

$250-$325k 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

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)

## About World Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: World Labs builds frontier spatial intelligence models (Large World Models) that perceive, generate, reason, and interact with 3D environments, enabling anyone to create persistent 3D worlds from text, images, or video.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Ben Mildenhall

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Spatial Intelligence / Generative 3D Models
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises in entertainment, education, design, simulation, robotics, and storytelling; also individual creators and developers via the product Marble.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Spatial intelligence transforms seeing into doing, understanding into reasoning, and imagining into creating.” The company aims to unlock AI’s full potential by moving from 2D pixels to full 3D worlds.

## Products & Services
- **Marble**: A generative 3D world creation platform that produces spatially consistent, high-fidelity, and persistent 3D environments from a single image, video, text prompt, or 360 panorama. Supports multimodal inputs, interactive editing, export to various 2D/3D formats, and collaborative sharing on the web. (Type: SaaS / API)
- **Large World Models (LWMs)**: The underlying research and foundation models that power Marble and future applications for simulation, robotics, and scientific discovery. (Type: Research / API / Foundation Model)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company).
- **Key Metric**: Total funding – **USD 1.23 billion** raised across 6 rounds (Seed, Venture Rounds, and Series C).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz, Radical Ventures (lead investors in seed round), Temasek, Sanabil Investments, Cisco Investments, and 39+ other institutional investors (per CB Insights). Major tech talent hires from Meta, Google, NVIDIA, Adobe, and Microsoft.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew **171% YoY** to 58 employees (as of mid-2026).
  - Monthly headcount growth rate of **+23.5%**.
  - Series C of **USD 1.0 billion** closed in February 2026 (confirmed by multiple sources).
  - Early customer/product traction with Marble, including case studies and hands-on tutorials.
  - Strong research presence with regular technical publications (e.g., “A Functional Taxonomy of World Models”, “Streaming 3D Gaussian Splatting”).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Pioneering spatial intelligence**: Combines generative AI, computer vision, and graphics to create coherent, editable 3D worlds – a capability that few companies have mastered at this scale.
- **World-class founding team**: Led by Fei-Fei Li (AI pioneer, ImageNet creator) and technologists with deep expertise in neural rendering, 3D reconstruction, and generative modeling (Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Ben Mildenhall).
- **Tight research-to-product loop**: The company intentionally integrates cutting-edge research with product engineering, enabling rapid deployment of novel capabilities (e.g., Marble’s multimodal input support).
- **Massive funding and investor confidence**: $1.23B in funding, including a $1B Series C, provides long runway for ambitious R&D and scaling.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the Marble platform, refining Large World Models, and expanding use cases into storytelling, simulation, robotics, and scientific discovery. Also focused on hiring top-tier talent across research, engineering, and product.
- **Growth direction**: Continue to push the frontier of 3D generative AI, enabling “the universal interface” for 3D content creation, and eventually interacting with both virtual and physical worlds through spatial intelligence.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: “A tight feedback loop between research, engineering, and product” – the company values curiosity, creativity, and rapid scientific progress. They emphasize that “now is a unique moment where rapid scientific progress has thinned the barrier between research and applications.”
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: All current job listings are based in San Francisco, CA, indicating an on-site or hybrid expectation. The company’s headquarters is at 640 2nd Street, San Francisco.
- **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Small, fast-growing team (58 people) with deep tech talent from top AI labs (Meta, Google, NVIDIA). Strong focus on real impact and shipping products. Technical stack includes Python, TypeScript, Slack, and modern sprint/launch workflows. Opportunity to work directly with world-renowned researchers and engineers on foundational AI challenges.

## Sources
1. [World Labs website](https://www.worldlabs.ai/)
2. [World Labs About page](https://www.worldlabs.ai/about)
3. [World Labs Careers on Greenhouse](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/worldlabs)
4. [World Labs LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/world-labs)
5. [CB Insights – World Labs](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/world-labs)

## Other roles at World Labs

- [Sr Business Development & Ops Lead, Robotics & Physical AI](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-business-development-ops-lead-robotics-physical-ai-world-labs-san-francisco-wva4th36mx4s) — San Francisco, CA
- [Executive Business Partner (Office of the CEO)](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-business-partner-office-of-the-ceo-world-labs-san-francisco-h8tft89e4wz2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer / Scientist (Robot Learning)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-scientist-robot-learning-world-labs-san-francisco-8k339q5nbper) — San Francisco, CA
- [Performance Engineer (Inference, Training & GPU)](https://feeny.ai/job/performance-engineer-inference-training-gpu-world-labs-san-francisco-8zx2g2p309p9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer / Scientist (SLAM)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-scientist-slam-world-labs-san-francisco-6c0p98x1m6hj) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer / Scientist (3D Tech Lead)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-scientist-3d-tech-lead-world-labs-san-francisco-mtzh9rjcf19w) — San Francisco, CA
- [Pipeline Engineer (Graphics/3D)](https://feeny.ai/job/pipeline-engineer-graphics-3d-world-labs-san-francisco-an10aaj3cm5e) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Scientist (Generative Modeling)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-generative-modeling-world-labs-san-francisco-r7yv2e73347f) — San Francisco, CA