About Nanogram

Nanogram is a TikTok-style mobile feed where every item is a short, AI-generated browser game. Anyone can make one from a prompt. We're a venture-backed startup with our core engineering team in Sofia.

The role

The game-generation pipeline is the product. Every game in the feed comes out of it: a creator's prompt goes through intent extraction, template matching, model routing, asset retrieval, generation, validation and repair, and finally the runtime that plays it.

You'll lead the team that builds and runs this system and own its design. You set the architecture, the roadmap and the evaluation strategy, and decide where models, templates and code each do the work. The team is measured on two numbers: playability pass rate going up and cost per generation going down, at volume.

This is a leadership and system-design role. Your time goes to architecture, technical direction, prioritisation, reviews and hiring. You should be able to prototype an idea or read through a failing generation trace yourself, but you won't be writing production code day to day.

What you'll do

Lead the AI team (ML/data engineering, game development and a contracted engineering partner): set priorities, run planning, unblock people, and grow the team as we scale.
Own the architecture of the generation pipeline end to end and decide how it evolves.
Define how we measure quality: benchmark suites, LLM-as-judge and playability pass/fail checks, and use them to show output improving over time.
Design the feedback loop that brings play data (completion, replay, shares, remixes) back into generation.
Own the economics: model selection and tiered routing, templates and retrieval, caching, and when distillation or fine-tuning is worth it.
Work with product, game design and core engineering to turn what creators and players need into a technical roadmap.
Keep us current on models and tooling, and make the call on what to adopt.

What you bring

Have led an engineering team that shipped an LLM-powered generation system to production at real volume.
Have designed multi-stage generation systems with evaluation built in: generation, validation, repair and eval, and the feedback loop between them.
Understand the cost side well: you've made model routing, caching and template/retrieval decisions that materially cut cost per generation while holding quality.
Technical enough to hold your own in architecture and code reviews, and to prototype when it's the fastest way to settle a question.
Comfortable making product trade-offs as well as technical ones.
Optional but highly recommended: experience in games. You've shipped games, worked at a games studio, or built tooling or content systems for games, and you know what makes a short game fun to play.

Nice to have

Experience with code generation or prompt-to-app systems.
Hands-on work with game engines or web game frameworks (Unity, Godot, Phaser, Three.js), or procedural content generation.
Fine-tuning or distilling open models in production.
Image or asset generation experience.
Startup or founding-team experience, or having built a team from a small base.

Hiring process

CV
Intro call with a founder (30 min)
System design interview (90 min)
Leadership and team interview (1 hour)

Logistics

Location: London. Remote-first for now, moving to hybrid as the London team grows.
Type: Full-time.
Compensation: £120,000-£150,000 gross per year plus equity.
Visa sponsorship: we're unable to sponsor UK visas at present, so you'll need the right to work in the UK.

Benefits

6% pension
Private health & dental
Gym allowance
Commuting season-ticket loan