Lead Data Engineer for Multimodal ML Pipelines

pika; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & equity

Full health benefits

Hybrid on-site/remote (HQ Palo Alto)

Job summary

Pika is seeking a staff or lead-level Research Engineer, Data to architect and scale data pipelines for multimodal foundation models. You will own data ingestion, labeling, quality, and privacy, enabling high-quality training datasets across text, image, audio, and video.

Join a collaborative, fast-growing startup with HQ in Palo Alto, offering full benefits and equity, hybrid work, and opportunities to influence cutting-edge generative AI research.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and scaling data pipelines for ML in staff/lead roles.
• Experience with LLMs, VLMs, or multimodal model data curation.
• Proficient in distributed data systems (Spark, Hadoop, Ray).
• Proven ability to deploy production-grade ML data infrastructure.
• Strong Python/SQL and cloud platform skills (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Knowledge of data privacy, ethics, and governance.

Responsibilities

• Own large-scale data pipeline architecture to support model training.
• Curate and manage diverse multimodal datasets.
• Develop scalable data ingestion, labeling, filtering, augmentation, storage.
• Ensure data quality, privacy, and compliance.
• Optimize data processing for distributed training pipelines.
• Prototype data management tools aligned with researcher needs.
• Integrate data innovations into production-ready systems.
• Stay updated on ML data management best practices.

Skills

Data pipelines

ML data curation

Distributed data systems

Python

SQL

Cross-functional collaboration

Problem solving

Tools

Spark

Hadoop

Ray

PySpark

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Pika is seeking a staff or lead-level Research Engineer, Data to architect and scale data pipelines for multimodal foundation models. You will own data ingestion, labeling, quality, and privacy, enabling high-quality training datasets across text, image, audio, and video.

Join a collaborative, fast-growing startup with HQ in Palo Alto, offering full benefits and equity, hybrid work, and opportunities to influence cutting-edge generative AI research.