Founding Data Engineer

Job Description

Staff Data Engineer (Founding Team)

Location: San Francisco (In-office)

Compensation: $180,000 – $270,000 + meaningful equity

Start Date: Immediate

About the Company

We have partnered with an elite team in SF building an AI-native platform that acts as an operating layer for modern organizations, helping leaders understand how their business actually runs, and where to optimize, automate, or restructure.

They are early, well-funded by top-tier investors, and already live with high-profile customers across enterprise, government, and private markets.

Experience

We are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to build their data platform from the ground up.

This is a founding-level role, you’ll define the architecture, tooling, and standards that power everything from internal analytics to customer-facing intelligence and AI systems.

You’ll work directly with the founders, engineers, and customers to design and deploy scalable data systems that ingest, normalize, and activate complex enterprise data.

Responsibilities

Own and build the end-to-end data platform (0 1) — ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving

Design and scale robust ETL/ELT pipelines across multiple enterprise data sources (HRIS, ERP, CRM, etc.)

Architect data models and semantic layers that power analytics, product features, and AI systems

Implement orchestration frameworks (e.g. Airflow, Dagster) for reliable, observable pipelines

Build and optimize large-scale data processing systems (batch + streaming where needed)

Partner closely with engineering and product to embed data into core product workflows

Work directly with customers to map, ingest, and operationalize messy real-world data systems

Establish best practices around data quality, testing, governance, and observability

Contribute to AI/ML pipelines (e.g. RAG, embeddings, feature pipelines) where relevant

Tech Stack (Current & Evolving)

Python • SQL • dbt • Airflow / Dagster • Snowflake / Postgres • AWS (S3, ECS, RDS) • Docker • Terraform

Why Join

True founding-level ownership over the data platform

Work on a high-impact product already in production with real customers

Operate at the intersection of data, AI, and enterprise systems

Small, elite team; high talent density, no passengers

Meaningful equity and the chance to shape the company from the ground up

We are looking to arrange interviews ASAP so please send across your resume and we can discuss further.

Full-time