Tech Lead, Data & Inference Engineer

Catalyst Labs is recruiting for an unnamed client, a San Francisco advertising technology startup focused on identity resolution and audience targeting. The Tech Lead, Data & Inference Engineer will lead the design and operation of scalable data and inference systems, while guiding architecture, reliability, cross-team data practices, and engineering standards.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development and scaling of an end to end data platform from ingestion to insights, ensuring that data is fast, reliable and ready for business use
• Build and maintain scalable batch and streaming pipelines, transforming diverse data sources and third party application programming interfaces into trusted and low latency systems
• Take full ownership of reliability, cost and service level objectives. This includes achieving ninety nine point nine percent uptime, maintaining minutes level latency and optimizing cost per terabyte. Conduct root cause analysis and provide long lasting solutions
• Operate inference pipelines that enhance and enrich data. This includes enrichment, scoring and quality assurance using large language models and retrieval augmented generation. Manage version control, caching and evaluation loops
• Work across teams to deliver data as a product through the creation of clear data contracts, ownership models, lifecycle processes and usage based decision making
• Guide architectural decisions across the data lake and the entire pipeline stack. Document lineage, trade offs and reversibility while making practical decisions on whether to build internally or buy externally
• Scale integration with application programming interfaces and internal services while ensuring data consistency, high data quality and support for both real time and batch oriented use cases
• Mentor engineers, review code and raise the overall technical standard across teams. Promote data driven best practices throughout the organization

Skills

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Mathematics
• Excellent written and verbal communication; proactive and collaborative mindset
• Comfortable in hybrid or distributed environments with strong ownership and accountability
• A founder-level bias for actionable to identify bottlenecks, automate workflows, and iterate rapidly based on measurable outcomes
• Demonstrated ability to teach, mentor, and document technical decisions and schemas clearly
• 6 to 12 years of experience building and scaling production-grade data systems, with deep expertise in data architecture, modeling, and pipeline design
• Expert SQL (query optimization on large datasets) and Python skills
• Hands-on experience with distributed data technologies (Spark, Flink, Kafka) and modern orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect)
• Familiarity with dbt, DuckDB, and the modern data stack; experience with IaC, CI/CD, and observability
• Exposure to Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Previous experience at a high-growth startup (10 to 200 people) or early-stage environment with a strong product mindset
• Strong Node.js skills for faster onboarding and system integration

Benefits

• Bonus
• Equity

Company Overview