Research Engineer / TPM

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 3D environments, both virtual and real. We're the team that's envisioning a future where AI doesn't just process information, but truly understands and interacts with the world around us.

We're looking for the overachievers, the visionaries, and the relentless innovators who aren't satisfied with the status quo. You know that person who's always dreaming up the next big breakthrough? That's us. And we want you to be part of it.

We are looking for a Research Engineer / Technical Program Manager to join our Model Team. This is a hybrid leadership role designed for someone who has been pivotal in successfully shipping cutting-edge AI models for products, has deep empathy and understanding for research workflows, has exceptional research engineering skills, and thrives in fast-paced, high-caliber startup environments.

You will work closely with researchers and engineers, to execute ambitious technical and research projects in service to products. You’ll drive execution for high-priority model initiatives, manage complex interdependencies, and ensure the team is delivering research that directly accelerates product value.

This role reports directly to leadership at the cofounder level and is pivotal to scaling the execution horsepower of the team, without compromising research and engineering excellence.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with research and engineering leads to scope, prioritize, and drive execution of key model development initiatives, with a focus on real-world product impact.

• Serve as the connective tissue between research and engineering, ensuring alignment, unblocking cross-functional challenges, and translating high-level goals into actionable roadmaps.

• Work alongside and earn the respect of top-tier researchers and engineers, facilitating a culture of rigor, transparency, resilience, and focus.

• Own timelines and delivery schedules for multi-stage research-to-production pipelines, including pretraining, fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment.

• Be part of the research engineering team that contribute hands-on to research infra, data curation, model development, or technology transfer where appropriate; this is not a pure coordination role. You’re a player coach on the engineering team.

• Be a foundational pillar for scaling our team, influencing org structure, hiring, and mentoring other team members.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• 5–10+ years of experience in technical program management, research engineering, or applied ML roles, preferably in high-growth startups or fast-paced research orgs.

• Prior experience managing a small team (engineers, researchers, or both) or leading cross-functional execution at a high level.

• Deep expertise with one or more of the sub areas of modern AI, especially including genAI based computer vision, graphics, 3D vision, vision-language models, foundation model development or related data-centric work. Deep knowledge and successful track record in training genAI vision models is prioritized.

• Ability to engage deeply with PhD-level researchers while maintaining an intense focus on action and shipping.

• Strong track record of turning ambiguous technical goals into successfully shipped models, features, tools, or systems.

• Hungry to work in startup conditions: limited structure, high ambiguity, strong ownership.

• Excellent communicator with ability to earn trust across disciplines—from product to infra to research.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with large-scale training infrastructure (e.g. JAX, PyTorch/XLA, multi-node clusters).

• Contributions to open-source ML projects or published papers.

Prior experience in a dual role (TPM / Tech Lead / Research Engineer).