Lead Engineer, ML Data Infrastructure & Systems

Build AI • San Francisco, CA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

Build AI is hiring a lead for its end-to-end data platform, spanning camera capture on workers through training-ready datasets and delivery to research customers. The platform handles in-the-wild monocular video at 1920×1080p and 30 fps, with a target of 100 million hours. This is a production media and sensor data infrastructure role, not a warehouse, analytics, or generic backend position.

The role covers on-device capture, uploads over unreliable networks, object storage, training-ready shards, media compression and codecs, dataset packaging and versioning, and delivery to external research customers. The engineer will work with Shenzhen firmware to establish a common ingest contract for new devices and make platform health, cost, and data-drop rates visible as collection expands across sites and countries.

Build AI is a fully in-person team in San Francisco (Financial District) and Shenzhen (Nanshan). Technical staff are expected to contribute to both engineering and research and work across disciplines as needed.

Requirements

• Have owned a production media or sensor data path at real scale, involving areas such as petabyte-scale object storage, video codecs and compression, uploads over unreliable bandwidth, or training-shard and dataset formats.
• Have experience with a comparable production data path; demo-scale ETL is not sufficient.
• Have strong software engineering skills, including Python and at least one systems language.
• Have Linux experience.
• Measure cost and throughput, rather than just whether a demo uploaded.
• Be interested in scaling in-the-wild physical-labor video rather than running a generic data organization.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with pose, multi-camera, or other large media besides video.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP, orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Airflow, or Temporal, or infrastructure as code.
• Experience with dataset management or annotation tooling.
• Experience shipping dataset delivery to external research or training customers.

Responsibilities

• Own the data platform end-to-end, from on-device capture and uploads over unreliable bandwidth to object storage and training-ready shards.
• Evaluate compression, codecs, and storage-tier trade-offs to control the cost of storing 1080p30 video.
• Build upload systems that handle poor networks through on-device buffering, batching, and retries, with observable drop rates.
• Own object storage and training-shard formats for petabyte-scale media.
• Own dataset packaging, versioning, and delivery to external research customers.
• Work with Shenzhen firmware to establish one ingest contract for new devices rather than separate paths for each SKU.
• Make platform health, cost, and drop rate visible as collection expands to additional sites and countries.

Benefits

• Competitive pay.
• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage.
• $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits.
• Housing subsidy of $2,000 per month for those living within walking distance of the office.
• Relocation support for those moving to San Francisco (Financial District) or Shenzhen (Nanshan).
• Wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more.
• Daily lunch and dinner in the office.
• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification.
• Unlimited Codex and Claude credits.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed