Software Engineer, Agent Data Platform
About The Position
At Sierra, we’re creating a platform to help businesses build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices in Atlanta, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Singapore, Japan, and Sydney. We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.
Requirements
- Designed, built, and operated large-scale data systems, processing terabytes or petabytes of data with technologies like Spark, Flink, Trino/Presto, and data lakehouse formats like Iceberg or Hudi.
- Strong backend and distributed systems fundamentals in a language like Go, Scala, or Python. Understanding the trade-offs of different storage engines, query plans, and data serialization formats.
- History of implementing pragmatic data governance, lineage, and testing. Built platforms that are cost-aware, highly operable, and a delight for other engineers to build upon.
- Well-versed in data modeling best practices (dimensional modeling, star/snowflake schemas, slowly changing dimensions) and know how to optimize analytical query patterns for both traditional OLAP systems and modern cloud data warehouses.
- Portfolio of shipped data products, including analytics dashboards, data visualization tools, or alerting and exploration systems.
- Skilled full-stack engineer (e.g., TypeScript/React and a service layer like Go), with a keen eye for performance, API design, and polish.
- Excel at turning ambiguous questions into clear, intuitive interfaces. Strong product sense around information architecture, handling empty states, and making complex data explainable.
- Practical experience with ML-powered product features, such as personalization, recommendations, or classification systems.
- Strong software engineering background with 4-7+ years of hands-on development experience in building and shipping production systems or products.
- A passion for being on the frontier of AI products.
- High agency and a bias to action in a high-autonomy environment.
- Degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Nice To Haves
- Deep experience with event streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis) and real-time data processing.
- Experience with modern data visualization libraries (e.g., ECharts, D3.js) and the principles of building performant, reusable charting components for complex data.
- Production experience with recommender systems or optimization loops (e.g., multi-armed bandits, ranking).
- A track record of leading complex technical projects or mentoring other engineers.
Responsibilities
- Architect and build our core platform to handle data at scale with low latency. This includes our real-time eventing infrastructure, streaming and batch ETL pipelines, and our Iceberg-based data lakehouse.
- Own the systems for interactive OLAP querying, orchestration, and experimentation, ensuring our data is trustworthy, fast, and easy to use for the entire organization.
- Develop the systems for long-term agent memory, build reusable Customer Data Platform (CDP) primitives, and implement the optimization loops that allow our agents to personalize interactions and demonstrably lift business outcomes.
Benefits
- Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
- Life insurance and disability benefits
- Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
- Parental leave
- Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
- Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
- Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
- Free alphorn lessons
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
