Engineer in Residence, Gesture Games

About the Role

This is a 12-week, full-time, on-site residency in Mountain View, California. The role is to build a new category of mobile games controlled by real-time hand movement through the phone camera, starting with a gesture-driven game that's immediately fun and obviously physical.

What You'll Build

• A playable game where gesture interaction is the core mechanic.
• A low-latency recognition loop that maps hand movement into responsive gameplay.
• Calibration, feedback, and fail-state handling for usability in real-world environments.
• A technical base for a reusable gesture-recognition platform.

What You'll Do

• Own the prototype across game loop, recognition pipeline, UX feedback, and on-device performance.
• Make tradeoffs between model quality, latency, battery, and game feel.
• Test the experience with real players to identify delight or frustration.
• Build the first product wedge while considering potential platform IP.
• Work with AI Fund's build team on gameplay scope, technical feasibility, and expansion paths.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Computer vision, on-device ML, pose or gesture recognition, or mobile game development experience.
• Strong engineering ability in inference pipelines, UX responsiveness, and real-time system constraints.
• A feel for interaction design and what makes a game mechanic fun.
• Ability to ship rough but playable prototypes quickly.
• Knowledge of how to use AI coding assistants and modern AI tools to accelerate implementation.
• US work authorization.

Helpful But Not Required:

• Experience with Unity, Unreal, CoreML, TFLite, MediaPipe, AR, or motion capture systems.
• Experience shipping mobile games or highly interactive consumer products.
• Experience optimizing real-time pipelines for noisy camera input.

Qualifications

• A builder who enjoys the combination of ML systems, interaction design, and fast consumer product feedback loops.
• Someone who wants to create a new input pattern.

Compensation

• $10,000/month for 12 weeks ($30,000 total).
• This is a contract role during the residency.
• If the build leads to a funded company, the next step is a founder-level role with meaningful equity upside.