Director, Data Platform Engineering (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

Expected base salary range: $300,000–$390,000 USD per year. Bonus potential and early-stage equity are also available.

Company

hirify.global is building AI-driven scientific superintelligence and autonomous systems for scientific discovery across medicine, materials, and energy.

What you will do

• Build, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of 30–40 data engineering experts.
• Own the data platform end to end, including architecture, delivery, reliability, security, scalability, and developer and data scientist experience.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for data ingestion, storage, processing, lakehouse, and data serving capabilities.
• Evaluate and adopt technologies such as Kafka, Flink, DuckDB, ClickHouse, and cloud-native object storage.
• Partner with data scientists, data engineers, lab scientists, product managers, and engineering teams to deliver data-intensive AI, ML, analytics, and inference solutions.
• Represent the data platform externally through conference presentations and technical writing.

Requirements

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

Nice to have

• Thought leadership through conference presentations or technical blog posts.
• Experience building and growing teams focused on open-source technologies.
• Experience with scientific data management and data quality.
• Experience building self-service data products where developer experience was a first-class concern.

Culture & Benefits

• Startup-speed environment focused on scientific discovery and high-impact AI systems.
• U.S. full-time employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage, employer-paid life and disability insurance, paid parental leave, and flexible time off.
• Additional benefits include educational assistance, commuter benefits, bike share memberships for office-based employees, and a subsidized lunch program.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region, with local-market salary levels.