Data/ETL Engineer (Founding Team)Location: San Francisco Bay AreaType: Full-TimeCompensation: Competitive salary + early-stage equityBacked by 8VC, we're building a world-class team to tackle one of the industry's most critical infrastructure problems.About the RoleWe're building a multi-tenant, AI-native platform where enterprise data becomes actionable through semantic enrichment, intelligent agents, and governed interoperability. At the heart of this architecture lies our Data Fabric — an intelligent, governed layer that turns fragmented and siloed data into a connected ontology ready for model training, vector search, and insight-to-action workflows.We're looking for engineers who enjoy hard data problems at scale: messy unstructured data, schema drift, multi-source joins, security models, and AI-ready semantic enrichment. You'll build the backend systems, data pipelines, connector frameworks, and graph-based knowledge models that fuel agentic applications.If you've worked on streaming unstructured pipelines, built connectors into ugly legacy systems, or mapped knowledge graphs that scale — this role will feel like home.ResponsibilitiesBuild highly reliable, scalable data ingestion and transformation pipelines across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sourcesDevelop and maintain a connector framework for ingesting from enterprise systems (ERPs, PLMs, CRMs, legacy data stores, email, Excel, docs, etc.)Design and maintain the data fabric layer — including a knowledge graph (Neo4j or Puppygraph) enriched with ontologies, metadata, and relationshipsNormalize and vectorize data for downstream AI/LLM workflows — enabling retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), summarization, and alertingCreate and manage data contracts, access layers, lineage, and governance mechanismsBuild and expose secure APIs for downstream services, agents, and users to query enriched semantic dataCollaborate with ML/LLM teams to feed high-quality enterprise data into model training and tuning pipelinesWhat We're Looking ForCore Experience:5+ years building large-scale data infrastructure in production environmentsDeep experience with ingestion frameworks (Kafka, Airbyte, Meltano, Fivetran) and data pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect)Comfortable processing unstructured data formats: PDFs, Excel, emails, logs, CSVs, web APIsExperience working with columnar stores, object storage, and lakehouse formats (Iceberg, Delta, Parquet)Strong background in knowledge graphs or semantic modeling (e.g.
Neo4j, RDF, Gremlin, Puppygraph)Familiarity with GraphQL, RESTful APIs, and designing developer-friendly data access layersExperience implementing data governance: RBAC, ABAC, data contracts, lineage, data quality checksMindset & Culture Fit:You're a system thinker: you want to model the real world, not just process itComfortable navigating ambiguous data models and building from scratchPassionate about enabling AI systems with real-world, messy enterprise dataPragmatic about scalability, observability, and schema evolutionValue autonomy, high trust, and meaningful ownership over infrastructureBonus Skills:Prior work with vector DBs (e.g. Weaviate, Qdrant, Pinecone) and embedding pipelinesExperience building or contributing to enterprise connector ecosystemsKnowledge of ontology versioning, graph diffing, or semantic schema alignmentFamiliarity with data fabric patterns (e.g. Palantir Ontology, Linked Data, W3C standards)Familiar with fine-tuning LLMs or enabling RAG pipelines using enterprise knowledgeExperience enforcing data access policy with tools like OPA, Keycloak, Snowflake row-level securityWhy This Role MattersAgents are only as smart as the data they operate on.
This role builds the foundation — the semantic, governed, connected substrate — that makes autonomous decision-making and agent action possible. From factory ERP records to geopolitical news alerts, the data fabric unifies it all.If you're excited to tame complexity, unify chaos, and power intelligent systems with trusted data — we'd love to hear from you.