Data Acquisition Engineering Lead

Reflection; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health insurance

Meals provided in office

Parental leave

Unlimited vacation (US)

Visa sponsorship available

Team offsites

Job summary

Reflection's Data team builds the training corpora our frontier models learn from, turning the open web, licensed corpora, and large-scale sources into structured, auditable datasets for pre-training.

As Data Acquisition Lead, you'll mentor a team across web crawl, pipelines, and data lakes, guiding technical choices, and collaborating with research and partnerships to maximize model quality and safety.

Qualifications

• Experience leading data or infrastructure teams while remaining hands-on.
• Own production-grade data pipelines at multi-TB to PB scale.
• Strong coding ability with credibility to earn trust.
• Expertise in web crawling, ingestion, or data lakes with cross-domain knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing data ingestion team.
• Provide front-line leadership across the full ingestion stack.
• Stay hands-on to contribute technically when needed.
• Manage day-to-day execution of data acquisition campaigns.
• Guide architectural decisions emphasizing scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Collaborate with research, partnerships, and legal on data acquisition.
• Work with data partnerships and vendors to onboard new sources.

Skills

Team leadership

Web-scale data systems

Data ingestion pipelines

Technical hands-on

Strategic decision making

Tools

Ray

Beam

Spark

Airflow

Prefect

Parquet

JSONL

WARC

Job description

Reflection's Data team builds the training corpora our frontier models learn from, turning the open web, licensed corpora, and large-scale sources into structured, auditable datasets for pre-training.

As Data Acquisition Lead, you'll mentor a team across web crawl, pipelines, and data lakes, guiding technical choices, and collaborating with research and partnerships to maximize model quality and safety.