Founding Platform Engineer
We’re supporting a client with the recruitment requirement outlined below. If your recruiting expertise and networks align with the role, please apply to express your interest.
Once approved to work on the opportunity, you’ll receive the full brief, including the client name, role details, and commercial terms.
Role Details
Location: New York, NY
Salary: $190,000–$260,000
Equity: Competitive
Employment Type: Full-time
Work Arrangement: Fully on-site, 5 days per week
Experience: Typically 4–10 years; exceptional candidates outside this range may be considered
Visa Sponsorship: No new sponsorship; visa transfers may be considered
Hiring: 1 candidate
Tech Stack: Python, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Kafka, distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, AI coding agents
About the Company
An AI-driven technology company building agents that manage digital advertising campaigns for major consumer brands. The platform generates approximately $3M in annual recurring revenue, serves more than 200 customers, and is backed by leading startup investors.
Its agents make over 90% of budget changes across campaigns managing more than $1M in daily advertising spend.
About the Role
This is the company's first dedicated platform engineering hire. You will take ownership of the infrastructure and data platform, define the technical roadmap, and build systems capable of supporting substantial real-time workloads.
The platform currently ingests around 20 TB of data monthly, reaches peaks of 10,000 jobs per second, and processes queries involving hundreds of gigabytes in seconds.
This is a hands-on infrastructure and backend engineering role focused on scalability, performance, and reliability—not a traditional full-stack product engineering position.
Responsibilities
Platform Ownership: Take ownership of the infrastructure and data platform, setting priorities and the technical roadmap.
Scalability: Build services and systems capable of handling significantly larger workloads, potentially reaching a trillion jobs per month.
Data Engineering: Develop real-time data pipelines and enable large-scale data joins and aggregations.
Database Performance: Profile and optimize ClickHouse and PostgreSQL, including query plans, CPU and memory usage, and storage structures.
Distributed Systems: Improve system throughput, reliability, and performance; introduce technologies such as Kafka or lower-level languages where appropriate.
Agent Infrastructure: Build capabilities that allow AI agents to query platform data directly.
Engineering Collaboration: Work closely with the CTO and product engineers to support customer-facing features and growing enterprise workloads.
AI-Assisted Development: Use coding agents for implementation, benchmarking, monitoring, and debugging.
Requirements
4–10 years of experience in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or low-level systems engineering.
Strong computer science fundamentals, including architecture, databases, and system scaling.
Strong backend engineering skills, particularly in Python or other performant languages.
Experience solving complex technical problems in production systems at scale.
Ability to build and implement solutions independently, from design through deployment.
Proven ownership of substantial engineering projects or shipped outcomes.
Comfortable working with ambiguous goals and defining technical priorities without a preset roadmap.
Ability to work on-site in New York City five days per week.
Benefits
Competitive salary and equity, with equity forming a meaningful part of the package.
Interview Process
Intro call
Founder chat
Technical interview
Superday—1 day: Paid, on-site practical building exercise and meetings with the team.
Offer
🌍 Remote from anywhere in the globe
Workplace, Culture & Diversity
Corporate culture is essential to allow the organization to differentiate itself. In terms of image on the one hand, it has strengths both internally and externally to consumers. It is indeed a source of cohesion and motivation of employees and it limits conflicts. With customers, it conveys a positive image and can develop a feeling of closeness to the company or even become a criterion of choice.
About Fractal Talent
We Are Fractal Talent, a global community of freelance and fractional recruiters. We provide recruiting expertise to our clients as a virtual extension of their teams, deployed on an embedded, project or per role basis, and matched to client need. Top tier quality, unrivalled flexibility.
If you're a recruiter, come join a community that acts as your outsourced sales function. We align your skills to our clients - with the aim to enrich quality recruiters and enable a far greater flexibility in how you manage your career.