Member of Technical Staff - Engineering Lead, Data Platform

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

Our Mission

Reflection is a research lab making intelligence open and accessible for everyone to use, customize, and build on. We build open models that let anyone control their intelligence and help shape the future of AI. Our mission: make intelligence open and accessible to all.

About the role

Reflection is building the trusted data backbone for the world's most capable open-weight AI systems. The Data Platform team builds and operates the core data systems and pipelines that power our research, training, and production environments unifying ingestion, processing, and orchestration across the entire data lifecycle so every team can move faster.

We're looking for a front-line technical leader to build, mentor, and grow this team. You'll guide its technical direction while staying hands-on this is a role for someone who has earned deep technical credibility as an engineer and now multiplies it through a team. You'll work closely with our research team to understand what high-velocity experimentation actually needs, and turn that into reliable, reproducible, scalable data infrastructure.

What you'll do

• Build, mentor, and grow a team of ~10 exceptional data platform engineers hiring, coaching, and raising the bar with every person you add.

• Guide the technical direction across the platform: ingestion and orchestration patterns for batch and streaming workloads, scalable compute and storage foundations, and reproducible pipelines with versioning, backfills, and isolated execution environments.

• Work closely with research, training, and production teams to enable high-velocity experimentation on a unified data layer.

• Establish trusted data quality, lineage, and governance signals so teams can make confident production decisions.

• Keep cost and performance predictable through guardrails, budgets, and continuous system tuning.

• Stay hands-on: design reviews, architecture decisions, and code where it matters most.

What you'll work with

• Compute & orchestration: Spark, Flink, Beam, Airflow, Dagster, Kafka, PubSub

• Storage & analytics: data lake and warehouse architectures, Parquet, Iceberg, Delta Lake, BigQuery, Snowflake

• Metadata & data quality: lineage systems, metadata management, Great Expectations, reproducibility systems

• Cost & performance: partitioning strategies, clustering, cost optimization, SLA-driven pipelines

About you

• 8+ years of engineering experience with a strong data engineering foundation — you've shipped and owned production-grade pipelines at large scale (tens of TBs to PBs daily).

• A track record as a staff/principal-level individual contributor before moving into leadership — you earn the technical trust of a strong team.

• You've managed and grown a team (~5–10), or clearly demonstrated the leadership readiness to build one quickly — while staying technically embedded.

• Deep in at least one of: ingestion & orchestration at scale, storage and processing engines (lakehouse formats, query engines), or data quality/lineage/reproducibility systems — with working breadth across the others.

• Fluent in the modern data stack; you've built new systems from zero rather than maintained legacy ones.

• Thrive in a high-agency, fast-paced environment; bias toward action and impact.

• Collaborative, clear communicator, comfortable working across research and infrastructure boundaries.

What We Offer:

We believe that to make intelligence open and accessible to all, you need to start at the foundation. Joining Reflection means building from the ground up as part of a talent-dense team. You will help define our future as a company, and help define the future of open foundational models.

We want you to do the most impactful work of your career with the confidence that you and the people you care about most are supported.

• Top-tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain our talent globally.

• Stock options: Everyone who joins and contributes to Reflection's success gets to share in the upside through stock options.

• Health & wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life, with an annual wellness allowance.

• Meals: Lunch and dinner are provided in the office daily.

• Life & family: 22 weeks paid parental leave for all new birthing and non-birthing parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys.

• Vacation days: Unlimited paid time off in the U.S. and 30 days in the U.K.

• Sponsorship support: We sponsor visas to help exceptional talent join our team and support long-term immigration pathways where applicable.

• Team building: We have regular off-sites, happy hours, and team celebrations.

Export Control Notice: This position may require access to technology or source code subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Any offer of employment for this role may be conditioned on the Company's ability to provide the candidate with access to such technology or source code in compliance with applicable U.S. export control laws, which may require the Company to seek government authorization.