Senior Software Engineer, Data

AboutWe're a stealth AI startup building an agentic AI product, assembling our founding engineering team in LA/SF now. We're pre-seed funded and heads-down until launch — full details are shared under NDA once we connect. We offer competitive salary, relocation assistance, great benefits, and founder-level equity.RoleYou'll own the data layer: the models, storage, and retrieval that power the apps, the pipelines that feed them, and the sync that keeps them consistent across devices. This is a founding seat — you'll set the technical direction from day one rather than inherit it.What you'll doDesign and build the data models, storage, and retrieval that power the appsOwn data reliability, schema migrations, and sync across services and clientsBuild ingestion pipelines that bring data in from external sources and APIsBuild and tune the retrieval layer — embeddings, indexing, and hybrid searchIndependently deliver complex data solutions from design through productionPartner with engineers and founders on system architecture, and set data engineering standardsRequired qualifications7+ years of software, platform, or data infrastructure engineering experience, including time building and operating data pipelines and data-intensive systemsStrong foundation in Computer Science, including data structures, algorithms, and systems designBachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience3+ years on local persistence and sync for MacOS/iOSBuilt at least one multi-device sync system with explicit conflict resolutionProficiency in Python for data and ML pipelines, and Swift and Kotlin for on-device data layers — SwiftData/Core Data and CloudKit, RoomHands-on with data stores across the stack — relational/SQL (SQLite, Postgres), key-value and graph stores, and data lake or lakehouse architectures — including data modeling and storage-engine tradeoffsExperience building high-performance, data-intensive applications for LLMs: ingestion and chunking pipelines, embedding model selection, vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone, or embedded on-device indexes), and full-text search with hybrid retrievalExperience designing data layers for on-device and edge AI, within tight memory, storage, and latency budgetsExperience building and shipping apps across macOS, iOS, Android, and Windows, as well as server-side systemsPreferred qualificationsTypeScript/Node or RustIntegrations with third-party APIs and data sourcesStreaming or event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub)Why joinA world-class AI team working on a deeply impactful visionA founding seat owning the layer everything else is built onDirect collaboration with the founders on product and technical directionBase salary $170,000–$240,000