Lead Platform Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 2, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 30, 2026.
About the company
Our client is an early-stage technology company.
The role
Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Act as the most senior engineer on a core data platform, guiding architecture, security and reliability decisions. The work combines hands-on backend development with mentoring and helping shape a growing engineering team.
What you'll do
- Lead the technical direction, delivery and scaling of a central data platform.
- Build and run the services that bring in varied inputs, expose them through APIs and store them reliably.
- Operate the graph database and search components that power advanced retrieval use cases.
- Develop high-throughput backend services in Go and Python.
- Plan platform security from the ground up, covering access between services, customer separation, credential handling and data protection.
- Manage cloud infrastructure, automated delivery pipelines and monitoring, and set reliability targets and shared developer tooling.
- Raise engineering standards through design guidance, code review and coaching.
- Partner with company leadership to interview candidates and hire engineers as the team expands.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- 5+ years of hands-on experience with production backend systems, data platforms or large-scale distributed services (3+ for exceptional candidates).
- A record of leading design, security and scaling decisions for a core platform.
- Experience bringing structure and discipline to young engineering environments.
- Strong working knowledge of container orchestration, infrastructure as code and modern CI/CD tooling.
- Experience building data pipelines that handle messy, varied source data.
- Experience at well-regarded engineering organizations or startups.
- Ability to work on-site in San Francisco, CA, five days a week.
- Legal authorization to work in the United States.
Bonus points
- Exposure to scientific or life sciences data.
- Familiarity with formal security or compliance certification efforts.
Benefits
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: USD 220,000 to 300,000 per year
- Equity
- Health, dental and vision coverage
- Life and disability insurance
- Retirement plan
- Paid parental leave
- Flexible time off and paid holidays
- Paid sick leave
- Learning budget
- Relocation support
Location and work model
- San Francisco, CA, United States
- On-site, 5 days per week in office
- Full-time