Lead Data Engineer

In this early-stage Lead Data Engineer role you own the data architecture and technical direction behind an AI-first product. You’ll build the data backbone from the ground up and collaborate with AI, backend and product teams to enable real-time data, vector search and ML workflows. You will define tooling, standards and contribute to shaping the data team as the product scales. The role offers hands-on influence over architecture decisions, performance at scale and data quality across streaming and analytics. This is a mission-driven opportunity to directly impact how data capabilities power AI features and product success.

• Competitive salary
• equity

• Architect scalable batch and real-time data pipelines
• Design ingestion, transformation and storage systems
• Build infrastructure for vector search, retrieval and ML workflows
• Improve data quality, observability and reliability
• Optimize large-scale datasets and query performance
• Support AI training, inference and product features
• Make long-term architecture and tooling decisions
• Help grow and mentor the data engineering function

• Strong experience in data engineering or backend engineering
• Experience designing scalable pipelines and distributed data systems
• Strong Python skills
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases
• Hands-on experience with vector databases
• Good understanding of data modelling, performance and storage architecture
• Experience with Spark, Airflow, Kafka or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch
• Experience with AI/ML platforms, cloud infrastructure or event-driven architectures would be useful

• Cross-functional collaboration
• Problem solving and initiative
• Mentoring or leadership potential
• Python
• Relational databases
• NoSQL databases