Founding Engineer, Data

Runtime Labs, Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

DataRuntime Labs is recruiting a Founding Engineer to own Óra's event data system, from ingestion to canonical serving, including provenance and recovery. You will define the canonical event model and enforce contracts across source observations, normalized events, and product-visible state.

You will collect raw observations from web, APIs, calendars, and custom integrations, then extract, normalize, and store time-indexed events with strong provenance.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building ingestion or data-pipeline systems.
• Ability to define schemas and evolving contracts for product use.
• Strong backend focus with a product-oriented mindset.

Responsibilities

• Own the event data system from ingestion to canonical serving and recovery.
• Define canonical event data model and contracts between raw observations and product-visible state.
• Build and maintain storage and serving paths (S3, Postgres, APIs) for trustful data.
• Collaborate with product and infra teams to improve data-layer contracts.

Skills

Backend TS/Node

Data ingestion

System design

Tools

Next.js

Playwright

Crawlee

S3

PostgreSQL

SQS

Temporal

Job description

# Founding Engineer, DataRuntime Labs builds Óra at ora.app.As a Founding Engineer focused on Data Infrastructure, you will own the systems that turn fragmented external sources into reliable event state: collecting raw observations, extracting and normalizing events, resolving duplicates and revisions, preserving provenance, and serving canonical time-indexed data to Óra. This role sits between infrastructure, data systems, and product integrations.## About the Role* Own Óra’s event data system across acquisition, canonicalization, provenance, freshness, storage, serving, and recovery* Define Óra’s canonical event data model and the contracts between source observations, normalized events, and product-visible state* Collect raw observations from web sources, APIs, calendars, and custom integrations; extract and normalize them into structured, time-indexed events* Resolve duplicates, revisions, and conflicts so Óra serves a coherent canonical event state* Preserve provenance from source observation through normalized event to product-visible state* Design storage and serving paths—including S3-backed corpora, Postgres-backed indexes, and efficient read APIs—for product and model-grounded workflows* Build freshness, backfill, retry, and recovery paths so event state remains trustworthy when sources change or pipelines fail* Work across Next.js and strong backend services to ship ingestion, tooling, and operator surfaces that keep the event data system healthy* Partner with Product and Infrastructure so data-layer contracts improve planning quality, sync, and contextual memory## About the Person* Infrastructure and systems engineer who wants ownership of a product-critical event data system, not just pipelines* Experience building or operating acquisition systems—web scraping, crawlers, or large-scale ingestion—and turning messy sources into reliable structured state* Comfortable defining schemas and contracts that evolve as product needs change* Strong backend skills; productive in modern TypeScript/Node environments and familiar with Next.js where product and ops tooling meet the data layer* Experience with tools such as Playwright/Crawlee, S3, Postgres, SQS, Temporal, or equivalent systems* Cares about correctness, freshness, provenance, and recovery—not just moving bytes* Excited by calendars, timelines, structured memory, and turning fragmented real-world sources into durable product primitives* Wants high ownership as an early long-term partner building a new product category## Experience* Prior work on marketplace, local, calendar, maps, or other event-heavy consumer data domains* Familiarity with rate limiting, proxying, robots/ToS-aware scraping, and respectful source access* Experience building internal tools for dataset inspection, lineage, or pipeline monitoring* Interest in model-grounded workflows that consume structured event context## Location & CompensationLocation: San Francisco. We are building the founding team in person and expect to work closely together during the company's early formation.Salary: $150k–$200k depending on experience and role.Equity: meaningful early-stage ownership for long-term partners.Exceptional candidates may be considered outside this range.We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every qualification.