Lead SWE
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 26, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 25, 2026.
We're Ooak Data
Ooak Data turns company data into training data for AI agents.
Frontier labs can train models to reason. They cannot train them to work: navigating a real company's Slack threads, half-finished Notion docs, contradictory Jira tickets, and permission boundaries. That requires real enterprise data, and you cannot synthesize it. You have to source it.
We plug into enterprise tools, anonymize everything into a structurally identical digital twin, and generate reinforcement-learning environments with expert-level tasks calibrated against frontier models.
We are a Y Combinator company with 8 figures contracts signed with frontier AI labs, and we are scaling delivery aggressively over the next months.
Our values
Trust, the foundation of every relationship, internal and external. We extend it by default and value the ownership that comes with it.
Ambition, we commit, we move fast, with tenacity and efficiency.
Collective, team first, low ego.
Kindness, at the heart of every interaction.
The offer
Location: Paris (city center), on-site with 1 to 2 days WFH
Start: as soon as you are available
Contract: full-time (CDI)
Compensation: €80k to €100k + bonus + equity (BSPCE)
Your missions
As Lead Software Engineer, you lead one of our product squads end to end: ingestion, anonymization & processing, or QA & delivery. You report to Thomas (CTO & co-founder).
Own your squad's delivery. Your squad ships a core part of the pipeline that turns full company data ecosystems into digital twins for the labs. Volumes, quality and reliability are yours.
Stay hands-on. You code, take on hard problems yourself and review a large share of the code. You lead by example: this is not an organization and reporting role.
Manage your squad. You lead 4 to 6 engineers, some of them very senior. You quickly take over their day-to-day management from Thomas: priorities, 1:1s, feedback, career growth and reviews. You also hire and onboard the next ones.
Shape the technical direction with Thomas and the other leads: stack, infrastructure, data architecture, code quality, testing, observability, and AI-native development practices.
Work hand in hand with product and ops: our delivery and run are embedded in the build, priorities move fast.
Concretely, over your first 12 months:
Ship at scale: the pipeline has to absorb hundreds of company data ecosystems over the next year, reliably and with auditable quality.
Build the squad with the founders: interviewing, closing, onboarding.
Structure the way your squad works: rituals, documentation, on-call, and how it collaborates with the other squads.
Who we're looking for
10+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers (teams of 4-5 people or more, including senior profiles).
Strong back-end depth on data-intensive systems: Python or Rust in production, SQL, distributed pipelines, cloud infrastructure (GCP or equivalent).
AI-native way of building: you have been building with coding agents every day for months, and you know how to make a team ship faster and safer with them. At Ooak, every engineer runs several Claude Code sessions in parallel.
- A track record of shipping in a demanding, fast-moving environment: start-up or scale-up.
High bar on quality and security: we handle our partners' most sensitive data.
Team first, low ego: you lead by clarity and trust, and you make the people around you better.
Fluent English, mandatory (working language with our clients and the labs).
The extras that make the difference
- Experience with data engineering at scale: ETL/ELT, orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, etc), warehouses and lakes.
- Experience with data anonymization, privacy, or security-sensitive systems.
- Strong interest in AI, RL environments, and how frontier models are trained.
- TypeScript on the side, for the platform.
Why join us
Entrepreneurial adventure: founding impact, live the early days of an ambitious company at the front line of the AI revolution.
Backed by Y Combinator, join just as we accelerate.
- Offices in central Paris.
Perks: Alan health insurance (mutuelle), 50% Navigo covered.
Recruitment process
We move fast.
- A 30 min intro call with Grégoire (co-founder)
- A 60 min technical deep dive with Thomas (CTO & co-founder): your track record, technical judgment, how you lead
- A technical case, presented to Thomas and a tech member
- A final fit interview with 2 founders
- Reference calls