Member of Technical Staff - Engineering Lead, Shared Services

Reflection; New York (NY); On-site; USD 240,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health & wellness

Meals in office

Parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Visa sponsorship

Team events

Job summary

Reflection is a research lab making intelligence open and accessible for everyone to use, customize, and build on. The Shared Services team powers our research, training, and production environments with scalable, reliable platforms.

As Shared Services Lead you’ll mentor engineers, shape architecture, and stay hands-on enough to contribute. You’ll drive design of SLIs/SLOs, on-call practices, and collaborate with research to turn needs into robust platform primitives.

Qualifications

• Experience building and mentoring engineering teams.
• Deep distributed-systems engineering experience with production-scale systems.
• Strong coding ability and credibility with a strong team.
• Depth in distributed systems architecture or service/platform areas.
• Familiarity with reliability tools: SLIs/SLOs, on-call, tail-latency.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of systems engineers.
• Provide front-line leadership of engineering efforts for shared services.
• Stay hands-on and contribute as an individual contributor.
• Prioritize work and manage projects in a dynamic environment.
• Guide technical decisions focusing on scalability and reliability.
• Collaborate with research/training teams to translate needs into platform investments.
• Raise the bar for technical judgment and execution.

Skills

Distributed systems

Team leadership

Hands-on coding

Strategy & execution

On-call / SLI-SLOs

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

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's Shared Services team builds and operates the shared services that power our research, training, and production environments—systems multiple teams depend on for model development, deployment, and evaluation. Sharding, replication, coordination, high‑concurrency correctness, and tail‑latency under real load are genuinely hard systems problems, and everything above us assumes this layer just works. As Shared Services Lead, you’ll provide leadership of the team that builds these services, build, mentor, and grow the engineers who own this layer, guide the technical and architectural decisions that shape it, and work closely with our research and training teams to turn their needs into reliable platform primitives. You’ll stay close enough to the stack to make targeted contributions as an individual contributor and to maintain a deep understanding of the team's technical work.

What You’ll Do

• Build, mentor, and grow a high‑performing team of systems engineers. Coach and support your reports in understanding and pursuing their professional growth.
• Provide front‑line leadership of engineering efforts to build and scale our shared services distributed systems design, container and Kubernetes abstraction layers, and the service platform teams build on.
• Stay hands‑on: become familiar with the team's technical stack enough to make targeted contributions as an individual contributor.
• Manage day‑to‑day execution: prioritize the team's work and manage projects in a highly dynamic, fast‑paced environment.
• Guide technical and architectural decisions, emphasizing scalability, robustness, and reliability. Design SLI/SLOs, healthy on‑call practices, consistency, backpressure, and tail‑latency under load.
• Work closely with our research and training teams to co‑design the primitives they depend on, and translate their needs into platform investments and roadmap.
• Raise the bar for technical judgment, prioritization, communication, and execution in a fast‑moving environment.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience building, mentoring, and growing engineering teams while staying technically hands‑on.
• Deep distributed‑systems engineering experience, with real ownership of production‑grade systems at scale.
• Strong coding ability and the credibility to earn the technical trust of a strong team.
• Depth in at least one of the team's core areas—distributed systems architecture, service reliability, or the container/service platform— with the ability to learn the rest.
• Fluency with the reliability toolkit: SLIs/SLOs, on‑call, sharding and replication, coordination services, and tail‑latency optimization.
• Ability to guide strategy and drive execution in a fast‑moving, zero‑to‑one environment, and partner effectively with research and training teams.

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 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.