Data Platform Engineering Lead - Open AI Backbone

Reflection; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Stock options

Health & wellness

Meals provided

Parental leave (22 weeks)

Unlimited PTO in US / 30 days in UK

Visa sponsorship

Team off-sites

Job summary

Reflection is building a trusted data backbone for open-weight AI systems. We seek a front-line technical leader to build, mentor, and grow a team, guiding technical direction while staying hands-on to support research and production needs.

You will work closely with researchers to enable high-velocity experimentation, establish data quality signals, and optimize costs and performance across data pipelines in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience with production-grade pipelines at large scale (tens of TBs to PBs daily).
• Track record as a staff/principal-level individual contributor before moving into leadership.
• Managed and grown a team of ~5–10 engineers, or demonstrated leadership readiness to build one quickly.
• Deep expertise in at least one of: ingestion/orchestration at scale, storage/processing engines, or data quality/lineage/reproducibility systems.
• Fluent in the modern data stack; built new systems from zero rather than maintaining legacy ones.
• Thrives in a high-agency, fast-paced environment with bias toward action.
• Collaborative, clear communicator across research and infrastructure boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and grow a team of ~10 data platform engineers, hiring and raising the bar with every addition.
• Guide the platform's technical direction across ingestion/orchestration patterns for batch and streaming workloads, compute/storage foundations, 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 confident production decisions.
• Keep cost and performance predictable with guardrails, budgets, and continuous system tuning.
• Stay hands-on with design reviews, architecture decisions, and critical code work.

Skills

Data engineering

Leadership

Team development

Ingestion & orchestration

Data quality

Tools

Spark

Flink

Beam

Airflow

Dagster

Kafka

PubSub

Parquet

Iceberg

Delta Lake

BigQuery

Snowflake

Great Expectations

Job description

Reflection is building a trusted data backbone for open-weight AI systems. We seek a front-line technical leader to build, mentor, and grow a team, guiding technical direction while staying hands-on to support research and production needs.

You will work closely with researchers to enable high-velocity experimentation, establish data quality signals, and optimize costs and performance across data pipelines in a fast-paced environment.