Head of Data Platform (AI)

Location: On-site in San Francisco, CA; London; or New York, NY

Company

hirify.global is a research lab building open-weight AI models and the data backbone that supports their research, training, and production environments.

What you will do

• Build, mentor, and grow a team of approximately 10 data platform engineers.
• Set the technical direction for ingestion and orchestration across batch and streaming workloads.
• Develop scalable compute and storage foundations, including versioned pipelines, backfills, and isolated execution environments.
• Partner with research, training, and production teams to support high-velocity experimentation on a unified data layer.
• Establish data quality, lineage, metadata, governance, and reproducibility systems.
• Stay hands-on through design reviews, architecture decisions, system tuning, and critical code contributions.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience with a strong data engineering foundation.
• Experience shipping and owning production-grade pipelines processing tens of terabytes to petabytes of data daily.
• Staff- or principal-level individual contributor experience before moving into engineering leadership.
• Experience managing and growing a team of approximately 5–10 engineers, or demonstrated readiness to build one quickly.
• Deep expertise in ingestion and orchestration at scale, storage and processing engines, or data quality, lineage, and reproducibility systems, with working breadth across the other areas.
• Fluency in the modern data stack and experience building new systems from zero in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Nice to have

• Experience with Spark, Flink, Beam, Airflow, Dagster, Kafka, or Pub/Sub.
• Experience with data lakes, warehouses, Parquet, Iceberg, Delta Lake, BigQuery, or Snowflake.
• Experience with lineage systems, metadata management, Great Expectations, partitioning, clustering, cost optimization, or SLA-driven pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• On-site collaboration within a talent-dense team building from the ground up.
• Competitive salary and equity, including stock options.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life insurance with an annual wellness allowance.
• Lunch and dinner provided daily in the office.
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave; unlimited paid time off in the U.S. and 30 vacation days in the U.K.
• Visa sponsorship and support for long-term immigration pathways where applicable.