Software Engineer, Data

Interfere; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision

Job summary

Interfere in New York City is looking for a data infrastructure engineer to own the data backbone, designing pipelines, schemas, and storage for events, traces, logs, and runtime data. You will work closely with AI/ML and product teams to ensure data is accurate, fast, and affordable at scale.

You will build high-throughput ingestion and real-time processing, with ClickHouse-based storage and streaming tooling. If you enjoy shaping architecture in a fast-growing startup, this is your role.

Qualifications

• Experience building production data infrastructure at scale with real throughput and cost awareness.
• Ability to reason about streaming vs batch, storage vs compute, and consistency vs latency.
• Experience documenting and explaining pipeline behavior to engineers, researchers, and PMs.
• Fluent in thinking about data quality, schemas, and storage evolution.

Responsibilities

• Own the data backbone: ingest, store, and query events, traces, logs, and runtime data.
• Design pipelines, schemas, and storage for scalable, fast access across teams.
• Build high-throughput ingestion and real-time processing without data loss or cost blowups.
• Collaborate with AI/ML and product teams on architectural decisions and data models.

Skills

Distributed systems

Real-time streaming

Go / Rust / Python

Data modeling

Cost optimization

Tools

ClickHouse

Kafka

Flink

Kinesis

BigQuery

Job description

Interfere turns a product's invisible failures into shared problems the whole team can see and fix. Every app has places where users get confused, blocked, or forced to abandon a flow, but most of those moments never make it into a support ticket. We detect those failures in real-time and provide every person responsible for the fix with the context they need. When Interfere flags a broken checkout flow, the PM uses our data to prioritize the issue, the designer sees where the experience broke down, and the engineer pulls the trace underneath. We're building the operating system for product quality, so teams can move from scattered symptoms to a shared understanding of what's actually going wrong. We're a seven-person team in New York, with $5.1M raised from Y Combinator, Vercel Ventures, Hummingbird, Designer Fund, and others. Interfere is already running in production with design partners, which means the work you ship will immediately help real teams find and fix the failures costing them users today. The category is still being defined, but the product to fill this gap is inevitable, and the company that gets there first will own how the next decade of teams ship software. We're looking for the people who will move at the speed that demands.

The Role

About

You'll own the data backbone of Interfere. Every signal the product reasons about (events, traces, logs, runtime behavior, code, session data) flows through systems you'll build, store, and query. The product's intelligence is only as good as the data underneath it, and that data is only useful if it's accurate, fast, and affordable at scale. That's your job. You'll work close to the AI/ML and product teams, designing the pipelines, schemas, and storage everything else sits on, and making the early architectural decisions the next ten engineers will inherit. Concretely, this looks like building:

• High-throughput ingestion that handles billions of product events without dropping data, slowing down, or melting the infra bill
• Real-time stream processing for detection and diagnosis, where the work has to be correct and low-latency at the same time
• Storage and query systems (ClickHouse; columnar, time-series, vector, whatever the problem calls for) that stay fast as customer data grows by orders of magnitude
• The indexing and retrieval infrastructure that lets agents and models find the right context at the moment they need it
• Schema, taxonomy, and data-quality systems that hold up as event shapes evolve and new product surfaces appear
• The cost, observability, and reliability layer for our own data systems, because observability for our customers starts with observability of ourselves

What we're looking for

• You've built and operated production data infrastructure at meaningful scale, with real throughput, real cost pressure, and real consequences when it breaks
• You're fluent in distributed-systems tradeoffs: streaming vs batch, consistency vs latency, full fidelity vs sampling, storage vs compute. You pick the right answer for the situation rather than the one you read most recently
• You take an ambiguous data or infrastructure problem, define the next useful step, and ship without waiting for a fully specified plan
• You treat cost as a feature. A system that works at 1x and burns the company at 100x isn't finished
• You can explain pipeline behavior, failure modes, and tradeoffs clearly enough that engineers, AI researchers, and PMs can make the right call quickly

Nice to have

• Deep experience with high-throughput streaming or stream-processing systems (Kafka, Flink, Kinesis, Materialize)
• Background in observability, telemetry, or session-replay data systems
• Built vector or hybrid retrieval infrastructure for AI/ML use cases
• Comfort across the full data lifecycle: ingestion, transformation, storage, query, retention, deletion
• Fluent in Go, Rust, Python, TypeScript, or whichever tool the throughput actually demands. We hire for how you reason about data systems, not for a specific language

Strong signals

• A data system you built that other engineers relied on, and that survived contact with real load
• Open-source work, technical writing, or talks where the tradeoffs and the reasoning behind them are visible
• You've replaced a vendor system with one you built, or replaced something you built with a vendor, and have strong opinions about when each is right
• You've cut a meaningful infrastructure bill in half, or doubled throughput on the same bill, without losing correctness
• You picked up an unfamiliar data store, query engine, or infrastructure pattern quickly and shipped something good with it
• You started something from zero, a pipeline, a platform, an internal tool, that people kept using after you left

How We Work

We're in person in New York City. The hardest parts of building Interfere, from system design to architecture tradeoffs to taste calls on the product, happen faster and better at a whiteboard with people physically in the same room. We measure work, not hours. Time at a desk is a poor proxy for whether work is getting done. But there's a lot to do and genuine urgency to being the category winners. Most people who do well here end up putting in serious hours because the problems are interesting and the upside is real. We ship daily, and we ship deliberately. Speed and taste are not in tension here. Every line of code is a choice: we don't let tech debt accumulate because velocity is easier. We write the code we would want to inherit, while still pushing meaningful changes every day. The roadmap is structure, not scaffolding. We plan out the week, so there's structure to what you take on. But the items on that roadmap are whole features and subsystems, each one a project in itself. If you see another problem along the way that needs solving, you own that too. It's your job to make your work into what it needs to be.

Compensation and logistics

• Health, dental, and vision
• Visa sponsorship for exceptional international candidates
• We'll help you move to New York

Interview process

• Intro conversation with the founder
• Onsite/work trial with the team in New York
• References and offer