Staff Data Platform EngineerLocation: NYC HQ or Remote (U.S.)| Full-time | Engineering
The Staff Data Platform Engineer Role.Reality Defender's detection models are only as strong as the data behind them, and every new generative tool raises the bar on the volume and variety of media we need to train and evaluate against. The Staff Data Platform Engineer will own the shared AI data platform behind our vision, audio, and multimodal research, turning acquired and internally generated image, video, audio, and text data into reliable, reproducible datasets, from continuous ingestion through processing, governance, and export. This is a senior, hands-on role where you'll complete our Databricks and distributed processing platform and build the reusable infrastructure behind our in-house synthetic data generation, including producing the very deepfakes our models learn to catch. This is a full-time role, reporting to our Director of Data. Responsibilities include:
- Own the end-to-end data platform for AI research: continuous ingestion, preprocessing, governance, and export of image, video, audio, and text data at high volume.
- Complete and scale our Databricks lakehouse and distributed processing stack (Spark, Ray, or similar), making architecture and build-vs-buy decisions that hold up as data volume grows.
- Build reusable infrastructure for in-house synthetic data generation, so researchers can produce new deepfake variants across modalities on demand instead of one-off.
- Make every dataset reproducible and traceable through versioning, lineage, metadata, quality checks, and stable train/eval splits, so any model result can be tied back to the exact data behind it.
- Own pipeline reliability, observability, and processing cost per dataset as core metrics of the platform.
- Partner with ML researchers to understand their data needs and turn them into self-serve tools that speed up model iteration.
- Mentor engineers and raise the bar on data engineering practices: code review, testing, documentation, and runbooks.
- Work with Security and compliance stakeholders to make sure data handling, licensing, and access controls meet the standards our enterprise and government clients expect.
- Help shape the long-term data platform roadmap with engineering and research leadership.
Who you are.- 8+ years building data platforms or data infrastructure, including staff- or lead-level ownership of production pipelines that generate, ingest, or deliver data at high volume.
- Deep hands-on experience with distributed processing (Spark, Ray, or similar) and lakehouse platforms, ideally Databricks, on top of cloud object storage (S3, GCS, or Azure Blob).
- Production experience with Databricks, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and Spark on AWS, including performance tuning, access controls, and operational troubleshooting.
- Experience working with large unstructured media such as video, audio, or images, including the realities of large files, decoding and transcoding, and metadata at scale.
- A track record of building reproducible ML datasets: versioning, lineage, data quality validation, and orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Databricks Workflows, or similar).
- Strong Python and SQL, and the judgment to own ambiguous platform problems end-to-end on a lean team.
- Own infrastructure and deployment automation using Terraform and CI/CD, including AWS storage, IAM, compute, Databricks resources, and distributed processing environments.
- Experience building synthetic data generation pipelines or running generative models (diffusion, voice cloning/TTS, video generation) at scale. (nice to have)
- Background supporting ML research teams with training and evaluation data, especially for multimodal models. (nice to have)
- Experience in security, fraud, trust & safety, or another adversarial domain, or at a Series A or B startup where scope regularly outpaces headcount. (nice to have)
Within 12 months, you'll...- Own a mature, self-serve data platform that researchers use to create, version, and export datasets without waiting on platform support.
- Have scaled synthetic data generation across vision, audio, and multimodal research, broadening our detection coverage of new generative techniques.
- Deliver reproducible evaluation datasets that let the company compare model versions with confidence.
- Be setting the multi-year data platform roadmap and leading high-leverage initiatives beyond the original scope.
What we offer.Reality Defender offers the following benefits to all our employees, regardless of location:
- Healthcare plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and partial coverage available for dependents
- Dental and Vision plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and their dependents
- Short/Long-term disability and life insurance plans with 100% premium coverage for employees
- FSA/HSA and 401k programs
- Equity compensation
- 20 days of PTO per year
- 12 weeks of Parental Leave
- Learning and Development budget
- Monthly wellness benefits
- Annual company-sponsored offsite
For employees working from Reality Defender's HQ in NYC, we offer the following benefits:
- Daily in-office lunch through UberEats
- Commuter benefits
- Remote Fridays
- Happy Hours and other local events
Base salary range: 210,000 - 260,000, based on experience, level, and location. Role includes equity.
