Role overview
Iconic Interactive is a seed-stage startup building AI that breathes life into virtual worlds. The future of entertainment is personal: entire universes shaped around each of us, where you are not watching a story but living at the center of one, shaping it. We're building every layer of intelligence these experiences need: characters that feel and convey meaning, narrators that weave your story, and world directors that act like an ever-present game master: adapting, orchestrating, surprising. We're a growing team tackling some of the most fascinating problems in AI: creating minds that inhabit and shape new worlds.
What you'll work on
- Research and develop open-ended systems that generate continuous streams of diverse, engaging behaviors and content
- Develop foundation model agent architectures for adaptive, context-aware reasoning and decision-making
- Design systems that enable virtual entities to adapt their behavior to different audiences, contexts, and situations in real-time
- Create methods for continual learning and adaptation in dynamic, unbounded settings
- Design evaluation and reward frameworks and metrics for novelty, diversity, engagement, and out-of-distribution generalization
- Collaborate closely with other researchers, artists, and animators to unlock new creative experiences
- Publish and present research at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML)
- Stay current with and contribute to the state of the art in open-ended learning and foundation model agents
What we're looking for
- Strong publication record at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML)
- Experience building training codebases for LLMs, RL agents, or open-ended methods in complex environments
- Expertise optimizing distributed training or inference systems
- Experience with procedural content generation or AI-driven narrative systems
- Background in artificial life, complex systems, or emergent behavior
- Familiarity with game engines (Unreal, Unity) or interactive systems
Tags & focus areas
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