Technical Lead – Data Platform

Base Salary: $240,000–$270,000, plus equity and benefits

Note:
No C2C arrangements will be considered.

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We are partnering with a well-funded, rapidly scaling technology company building advanced AI-powered data and analytics systems for major global enterprises.

The company operates a highly sophisticated data and computing environment and is solving difficult problems across distributed systems, large-scale data processing, performance engineering, and production AI infrastructure.

This role sits within an independent, product-focused data division that operates with significant technical autonomy while sharing infrastructure, engineering standards, and operational resources with the broader organization.

We are seeking a Technical Lead – Data Platform to set the technical direction and architecture for a high-scale data platform and its underlying processing systems.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who wants staff- or principal-level influence while remaining deeply involved in production engineering. You will serve as the engineering anchor for the team: defining architecture, guiding technical execution, reducing roadmap risk, raising engineering standards, mentoring experienced engineers, and personally building the most difficult components.

Your influence will come from the quality of your technical judgment, architecture, code, and ability to bring the team with you.

• Own the technical direction and architecture of the data platform and processing systems
• Lead technical execution across system design, sequencing, standards, and tradeoffs
• Build the most complex, high-risk, and performance-sensitive platform components
• Prototype, benchmark, and validate technical approaches before broader implementation
• Identify and reduce architectural and delivery risks
• Establish standards for system design, implementation, testing, observability, and documentation
• Lead architecture reviews, design reviews, and code reviews
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar across the team
• Collaborate with product, data science, machine learning, infrastructure, and SRE teams
• Improve platform scalability, resilience, performance, and observability
• Clearly communicate complex engineering decisions and tradeoffs to technical and nontechnical stakeholders

• 10+ years of experience building production data platforms, distributed systems, infrastructure, or systems software
• Demonstrated success as the technical anchor on complex, high-scale engineering projects
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems
• Strong experience with event-driven architectures and asynchronous processing
• Hands-on experience with large-scale data technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Flink, or comparable frameworks
• Experience with workflow orchestration and complex data-processing pipelines
• Experience with modern lakehouse or analytical-storage technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or similar
• Professional experience with at least one systems-oriented programming language
• Strong performance-engineering instincts, including profiling, concurrency, throughput, and latency optimization
• Experience setting technical direction through architecture, design reviews, code reviews, and mentorship
• Excellent technical communication and sound engineering judgment
• Ability to work onsite in San Francisco five days per week

• Rust
• CUDA or GPU-computing experience
• Kernel-level or low-level systems optimization
• High-performance computing
• Cloud-based data services
• MLOps or…