Data Platform Engineering Lead for Open AI

AI Chopping Block; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Stock options

Health & wellness benefits

Meals in the office

Parental leave

Unlimited vacation (US)

Job summary

Reflection is building the trusted data backbone for open-weight AI systems. As a front-line technical leader, you will build, mentor, and grow the Data Platform team and guide its technical direction while staying hands-on.

You will work with research, training, and production teams to enable rapid experimentation on a unified data layer, establish data quality signals, and keep cost and performance predictable through governance and tuning.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience with production-grade data pipelines at large scale.
• Staff/principal-level IC before moving into leadership.
• Managed and grown a team (~5–10) while staying technically embedded.
• Deep in at least one: ingestion/orchestration at scale, storage/processing engines, or data quality/lineage/reproducibility.
• Fluent in the modern data stack and built new systems from zero.
• Thrives in a high-agency, fast-paced environment with impact.
• Collaborative, clear communicator across research and infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and grow a team of ~10 data platform engineers hiring and coaching.
• Guide technical direction across ingestion/orchestration, compute/storage, and pipelines.
• Collaborate with research/training/production for high-velocity experimentation on a unified data layer.
• Establish data quality, lineage, and governance signals for production decisions.
• Maintain cost and performance through guardrails, budgets, and tuning.
• Stay hands-on with design reviews and architecture decisions.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Collaboration

Bias toward action

Tools

Spark

Flink

Beam

Airflow

Dagster

Kafka

Pub/Sub

BigQuery

Snowflake

Parquet

Iceberg

Job description

Reflection is building the trusted data backbone for open-weight AI systems. As a front-line technical leader, you will build, mentor, and grow the Data Platform team and guide its technical direction while staying hands-on.

You will work with research, training, and production teams to enable rapid experimentation on a unified data layer, establish data quality signals, and keep cost and performance predictable through governance and tuning.