Data Engineer

Location: New York City (in-office 4 days per week)Employment Type: Full-timeAbout the CompanyThe company has built an agentic AI platform designed specifically to drive success for multi-unit franchise owners—covering everything from initial brand discovery to ongoing portfolio management.For prospective franchisees: The platform’s AI agents identify the most relevant franchise opportunities and guide users through the process of building a profitable multi-unit portfolio.For current operators: The AI agents automate routine workflows, surface actionable insights, and uncover new growth opportunities.For brands: The platform connects brands with a well-qualified pipeline of ambitious franchisees while streamlining time‑intensive franchise development processes.Franchising represents a massive market with over 800,000 locations in the United States, nearly one trillion dollars in annual consumer spending, and a rapidly expanding international footprint. Multi‑unit operators now account for more than half of all franchise locations, yet the tools and infrastructure available to build and scale these portfolios remain fragmented and outdated. The company is solving this problem with support from leading venture investors, angel investors, and franchise industry veterans.About the RoleThe team is looking for a Data Engineer to build and own the data foundation that powers the platform and its AI agents. The business relies on a deep, continuously evolving dataset of public and proprietary information, and the company needs someone who can transform that raw complexity into clean, reliable, AI‑ready data.This person will have end‑to‑end ownership of the data stack—from ingestion and transformation through modeling and downstream consumption. Their work will directly shape what the platform’s AI agents can do for operators and brands. Beyond the data layer, the role also offers opportunities to build entire products end‑to‑end, including owning the user experience.What the Data Engineer Will DoDesign and build scalable data pipelines that ingest, normalize, and enrich industry data from a wide range of structured and unstructured sourcesOwn the data model and warehouse architecture that powers the product, AI agents, and internal analyticsBuild the infrastructure that makes industry data AI‑ready—including relational databases, vector stores, embeddings pipelines, feature stores, and retrieval layersOwn data‑centric features end‑to‑end: manage the underlying data, build AI‑powered matching engines, configure user‑facing agents, and ship the frontend experiences that surface data‑driven insights and opportunities to usersOwn business intelligence and reporting: build the infrastructure and analyses that turn business data into clear, actionable insights; turn questions like “I wonder if…” into trusted answers, and shape what the team builds next based on the insights surfacedExplore new data sources and partnerships that expand the company’s industry knowledge graph across the franchise ecosystemDefine data quality, observability, and lineage standards to increase data trust and reliabilityShape how the company thinks about data as a long‑term competitive moatWho the Company Is Looking For6+ years of data engineering experience, ideally in a product‑focused or AI‑driven environmentStrong experience designing and operating production data pipelines—batch and streaming, structured and unstructuredComfortable with modern data warehouse / lakehouse technologies, orchestration tools, and transformation toolingComfortable working with unstructured data and supporting AI/ML workloadsStrong data modeling instincts and high standards for data quality, observability, and reliabilityHigh ownership mindset: treats the data stack as a core product pillar and holds themselves accountable to a high standardCurious and ambitious: enjoys going deep on messy real‑world data and turning it into genuine customer impactBias for action: ships and iterates quickly without waiting for perfect conditions or complete informationAI‑native: already uses AI coding tools to amplify personal impact and velocity; even if their current company does not lean heavily on AI, they regularly use AI tools on their own and are eager to work in an environment that makes AI a core pillarStartup or early‑stage experience is a plusInterest in franchising and local businesses is a plusWhy Join the CompanyMeaningful impact: Help support local communities by empowering local operators and elevating great franchise brandsOwnership and responsibility: Own significant pieces of the business and have direct influence on company directionAI‑native culture: Join a team that is pushing the boundaries of what AI can do, both for the product and for how the team operates internallyStrong benefits: Fully covered healthcare options and unlimited PTOIn‑person team: Work alongside the founding team in New York City