Senior Data Engineer

Linkup; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible remote-work policy

Job summary

Linkup is seeking a Senior Data Engineer in San Francisco to build and operate large-scale data pipelines powering AI-ready web search. You will design ETL/ELT workflows, optimize data ingestion, and manage scalable storage across SQL/NoSQL and object stores.

You will collaborate with ML and backend teams, contribute to system architecture, and ensure high data quality, observability, and low-latency data delivery for ranking and retrieval.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of data engineering or backend development experience
• Experience with distributed systems and streaming architectures
• Focus on data quality, observability, and reliability
• Ability to debug pipelines and optimize for latency/throughput
• Interest in AI infrastructure, indexing, and retrieval-augmented generation
• Thrives in fast-paced, high-ownership startup environment

Responsibilities

• Build and operate large-scale data pipelines powering AI-ready web search
• Design and maintain ETL/ELT workflows for web indexing, embeddings, and analytics
• Develop and optimize data ingestion and transformation across sources
• Manage and scale data storage layers (SQL/NoSQL/object stores)
• Participate in architecture discussions and system design for data infra
• Collaborate with ML and backend teams to deliver real-time data for ranking/retrieval
• Write clean, maintainable code and participate in code reviews

Skills

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

Back-end development

Observability

Latency optimization

AI infrastructure

Startup environment

Tools

PostgreSQL

OpenSearch

Vespa

Apache Storm

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

About the role

We're looking for a top-tier Senior Data Engineer to join our tech team and work hand-in-hand with our CTO, Denis Charrier, and the rest of the tech team.

Your core responsibilities will be to:

• Build and operate large-scale, high-throughput data pipelines powering AI-ready web search

• Design and maintain distributed ETL / ELT workflows for web indexing, embeddings, and analytics

• Develop and optimize data ingestion and transformation systems across structured and unstructured sources

• Manage and scale data storage layers (SQL, NoSQL, and object stores) for performance and reliability

• Participate in architecture discussions and contribute to system design for data infrastructure

• Collaborate with ML and backend teams to deliver high-quality, real-time data for ranking and retrieval

• Write clean, maintainable code and participate in code reviews

Requirements

You’re a great match if you:

• Are excited to help build Google for AI agents - and believe in Linkup’s mission

• Have strong experience in data engineering or backend development (3y minimum)

• Understand distributed systems, data modeling, and streaming architectures

• Care about data quality, observability, and system reliability

• Enjoy debugging tough pipeline issues and optimizing for latency or throughput

• Are curious about AI infrastructure, indexing systems, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

• Thrive in a fast-paced, high-ownership startup environment

Example Projects

• Stream and transform billions of web facts per day under strict freshness SLAs (< 5 min)

• Build a real-time data lake to serve embeddings, metadata, and ranking features to LLMs

• Design fault-tolerant pipelines for continuous crawling, deduplication, and enrichment

• Develop internal tools to monitor and profile data flows across terabytes of web-scale content

Our Stack

• Node.js / NestJS

• Python

• Java

• PostgreSQL

• OpenSearch

• Vespa

• Apache Storm

• Kubernetes

• GitHub Actions

• Terraform

Details

The ideal candidate will play a central role in our engineering team, partnering closely with the founders to spearhead groundbreaking products. Your expertise will shape the future of AI‑powered applications and bring our vision to life.

We offer a flexible remote‑work policy- see the details here.

Join us and leverage your expertise to push the boundaries of AI!

About Linkup

Our Vision

We believe in a future of AI agents and the agentic web. These digital entities can create more value for humanity than we ever could alone, but they depend on the internet to operate, collaborate, take action, and gather information.

AI agents need web search. To perform well, they require information that is current, reliable, and context‑specific—not the diffuse, steadily aging knowledge frozen at their last training cut‑off.

Modern web search is built for humans, not AIs. Instead of trusted facts, it serves links, ads, and click‑bait. People want visually engaging pages; AI systems need structured truth. An AI can absorb oceans of data, while human attention barely skims the surface. Humans think visually and intuitively; AI reasons in latent space.

Web 2.0 is sunsetting. The deck is being reshuffled, and the Bing‑Google search oligopoly is crumbling. Indexing ever more pages is no longer the goal; semantically organizing facts for AI systems is. In the coming agentic web, Google’s ad‑driven model has no natural home.

Search for AI must be rebuilt from the ground up. We are reconstructing the web as a rigorously structured knowledge layer, mapping every concept, entity, and claim into a coherent semantic graph. This foundation delivers verified facts and rich context to AI instantly, unlocking faster reasoning, higher accuracy, and radically more useful answers for everyone.

Humans search Google; AI searches Linkup.

Our Mission

Reality never stands still, and neither should intelligence. Linkup reconnects language models to a living stream of verified facts, ensuring AIs remain as current and insightful as the world they serve.

Our mission is to deliver the world’s freshest, most trusted knowledge to AIs.

Our Culture

Our culture is built on the following values:

• Mission. We believe we play a critical role in building the agentic web. We are 100% committed to our mission of bringing the reality of the world to AI agents.

• Speed. We build fast, we build to last. We get things done, well.

• Ownership. We empower every team member to take ownership of their projects, ensuring they see them through to successful completion.

• Teamwork. Our strength lies in our unity. We rely on one another and embrace our diversity as a core asset.

• Humility. We maintain low egos, showing respect for others and continuously learning from their insights and experiences.

We expect all team member to take an active role in shaping our company culture.

Our Team

We are small technical team, working shoulder to shoulder to build the web of agents.

A bit more about our 3 co-founders:

• Philippe Mizrahi- Led the development of Lyft’s Autonomous Vehicles marketplace. Previously launched Amundsen, an open source search engine.

• Denis Charrier- Founding Engineer at Niland, an audio search company (acquired by Spotify), then Staff Engineer at Spotify. 15y of software development experience.

• Boris Toledano- Led robotics at Carrefour, after 3y at McKinsey & Co working on public affairs and digital transformation.