Staff Data Platform Engineer - Equity & Remote Fridays

Reality Defender Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare plans with 100% premium for

Dental and Vision plans with 100%

Short/Long-term disability and life保险

FSA/HSA and 401k programs

Equity compensation

20 days of PTO per year

12 weeks of Parental Leave

Learning and Development budget

Monthly wellness benefits

Annual company-sponsored offsite

Daily in-office lunch through UberEats

Commuter benefits

Remote Fridays

Happy Hours and local events

Job summary

Reality Defender is seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer in New York City to own and scale our AI data platform for multimodal research. You will turn raw media into reliable, reproducible datasets and drive the Databricks lakehouse architecture across Spark and distributed processing.

You will mentor engineers, coordinate with ML researchers, and ensure data governance, security, and cost efficiency while shaping the long-term roadmap.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building data platforms or data infrastructure with production pipelines
• Hands-on experience with distributed processing (Spark, Ray) and lakehouse platforms
• Production experience with Databricks and Spark on AWS, including performance tuning and access controls
• Experience with large unstructured media and metadata at scale
• Strong Python and SQL; able to own platform problems end-to-end
• Experience with Terraform and CI/CD in cloud environments
• Experience building synthetic data generation pipelines is a plus

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end data platform for AI research: ingestion, preprocessing, governance, export of image, video, audio, and text data
• Scale Databricks lakehouse and distributed processing stack; evaluate build-vs-buy decisions
• Build reusable infrastructure for in-house synthetic data generation across modalities
• Ensure datasets are reproducible via versioning, lineage, and quality checks
• Own pipeline reliability, observability, and cost per dataset
• Partner with ML researchers to create self-serve tools; speed up model iteration
• Mentor engineers and raise data engineering standards
• Collaborate with Security and compliance to meet enterprise standards
• Help shape long-term data platform roadmap

Skills

Distributed processing

Python

SQL

Data platforms

Databricks lakehouse

Terraform

CI/CD

Data governance

Versioning & lineage

Tools

Databricks

Unity Catalog

Delta Lake

Spark

Ray

Airflow

Dagster

Job description

Reality Defender is seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer in New York City to own and scale our AI data platform for multimodal research. You will turn raw media into reliable, reproducible datasets and drive the Databricks lakehouse architecture across Spark and distributed processing.

You will mentor engineers, coordinate with ML researchers, and ensure data governance, security, and cost efficiency while shaping the long-term roadmap.