Lead Platform Engineer

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.

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.

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