Staff Engineer & Data Platform Lead

Reflection AI; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Stock options

Health & wellness benefits

Meals provided in the office

Parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Visa sponsorship

Team off-sites

Job summary

Reflection AI in San Francisco is seeking a front-line technical leader to build, mentor, and grow the Data Platform team, turning research needs into reliable, scalable data infrastructure you can own from design to deployment.

You will guide technical direction across ingestion, orchestration, compute, and storage, collaborate with research, training, and production squads, and stay hands-on to drive architecture decisions, cost control, and data quality at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience with a strong data engineering foundation— you've shipped and own 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Data engineering leadership

Distributed data pipelines

Team leadership

Collaborative communication

Tools

Spark

Flink

Beam

Airflow

Dagster

Kafka

Pub/Sub

Parquet

Iceberg

Delta Lake

BigQuery

Snowflake

Job description

Reflection AI in San Francisco is seeking a front-line technical leader to build, mentor, and grow the Data Platform team, turning research needs into reliable, scalable data infrastructure you can own from design to deployment.

You will guide technical direction across ingestion, orchestration, compute, and storage, collaborate with research, training, and production squads, and stay hands-on to drive architecture decisions, cost control, and data quality at scale.