Director, Data Platform Engineering (AI)

TL;DR

Director, Data Platform Engineering (AI): Leading the development and maintenance of Lila's product data platform, ensuring its reliability, scalability, and developer/data scientist experience with an accent on data ingestion, storage, processing, and interaction. Focus on building innovative, agentic, and low-code solutions to deliver data interfaces for exploration, query, analytics, and ML/inference at scale.

Location: San Francisco, CA USA

Salary: $232,000 - $304,000 USD

Company

hirify.global is the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous lab for life, chemistry, and materials science.

What you will do

• Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 8-12 data engineering experts.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for our data platform, aligning with Lila’s overall data strategy.
• Partner with data scientists, data engineers, lab scientists, product managers, and other stakeholders to understand their data processing needs and requirements.
• Represent Lila’s data platform work at external conferences.
• Drive innovative, agentic, and low-code solutions to deliver data interfaces - exploration, query, analytics, and ML/inference solutions at scale.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software development experience, with a focus on data processing at scale. 5+ years of experience leading senior engineers.
• Experience with building on AWS/GCP primitives like S3 + Athena/BigQuery, and query engines.
• Operated data platforms at petabyte scale with sub-second query latency requirements.
• Experience managing data infrastructure supporting 100+ concurrent ML training and inference workloads.
• Familiarity with LLM/AI-native data patterns — vector stores, embedding pipelines, pre/mid/post training.
• Hands-on coding in Python and modern backend frameworks. Experience with infrastructure-as-code and containerized deployments (Kubernetes).
• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field of study.

Nice to have

• Thought leadership in the community via presentations in conferences or blog posts.
• Experience building and growing teams focusing on open source technologies.
• Scientific data management and quality experience
• Built self-service data products/platforms where developer experience was a first-class product concern.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation including bonus potential and generous early equity.
• Committed to equal employment opportunity.