Data Platform Engineering Lead — Build & Scale Pipelines

Sierra Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health & wellness benefits

Meals provided in the office

Parental leave (22 weeks+)

Job summary

Reflection is seeking a front-line technical leader to build, mentor, and grow a data platform team responsible for the core data systems powering research, training, and production environments. You will shape technical direction across ingestion, orchestration, storage, and pipelines while remaining hands-on to earn deep credibility.

You will collaborate with researchers and production teams to enable rapid experimentation on a unified data layer, establish data quality and governance signals,

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience with a strong data engineering foundation.
• Staff/Principal-level IC experience before moving into leadership.
• Managed and grown a team (~5–10) or demonstrated leadership readiness.
• Deep in ingestion & orchestration at scale, storage/processing engines, or data quality/lineage/reproducibility systems.
• Fluent in the modern data stack and built new systems from zero.
• Bias toward action, impact, and high agency.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and grow a team of ~10 data platform engineers, hiring and coaching.
• Set and guide technical direction for ingestion, orchestration, compute, storage, and reproducible pipelines.
• Collaborate with research, training, and production teams to enable high-velocity experimentation on a unified data layer.
• Establish trusted data quality, lineage, and governance signals for production decisions.
• Maintain cost and performance with guardrails, budgets, and continuous tuning.
• Stay hands-on with design reviews, architecture decisions, and critical code.

Skills

Data engineering

Leadership

Mentorship

Team building

Communication

Strategy & direction

Cloud platforms

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent

Tools

Spark

Flink

Beam

Airflow

Dagster

Kafka

BigQuery

Snowflake

Parquet/Delta/Iceberg

Great Expectations

Job description

Reflection is seeking a front-line technical leader to build, mentor, and grow a data platform team responsible for the core data systems powering research, training, and production environments. You will shape technical direction across ingestion, orchestration, storage, and pipelines while remaining hands-on to earn deep credibility.

You will collaborate with researchers and production teams to enable rapid experimentation on a unified data layer, establish data quality and governance signals,