Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineering
Distributed Spectrum, New York City
- Pay
- $160K – $200K • Offers Equity
- Work type
- Onsite
- Level
- Senior
- Area
- Software engineering, Inference & ML systems, ML / AI engineering
- Posted
- Oct 6, 2026
About the role
DS creates systems that power the next generation of radio spectrum intelligence. We collect radio data from all over the world, train neural networks to decipher it, and run them on the smallest chips we can. We’re solving a new, technically hard problem where nothing from other fields works out of the box, and along the way, we’ve built our own stack from scratch, including entirely new embedding model architectures, custom GPU kernels, and much more.
Joining DS means owning major parts of a fast-growing AI research organization, joining a collaborative, talent-dense team with decades of experience in probabilistic ML, accelerated computing, embedded systems, and signal theory, and growing your career in the areas that interest you. You’ll fit in if you want to come to work for the problem itself and don’t want to choose between technical rigor, business value, and real-world impact.
We work with high ownership and trust.
THE ROLE
DS collects radio data at a scale few organizations ever see — continuous, high-rate streams from sensors around the globe. We're hiring a Senior Data Engineer to design the platform that turns that firehose into an asset: a data lakehouse that serves researchers training models, production systems running inference, and agents retrieving context in real time.
You'll own the architecture from ingestion through storage, cataloging, vector search, and access, and you'll design it explicitly for AI/ML workloads, not just analytics.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Architect and build our data lakehouse: ingestion pipelines, open table formats, partitioning and compaction strategies, cataloging, and governance.
- Design and operate vector database infrastructure for embedding storage, similarity search, and retrieval at scale — choosing, tuning, and evolving the right systems for our workloads.
- Build large-scale data management systems: lifecycle and retention, lineage, versioning of datasets for reproducible training, quality monitoring, and cost management across petabyte-class storage.
- Design data platform capabilities that directly support ML use cases — feature and embedding pipelines, training-set assembly, evaluation datasets, and low-latency retrieval for agents.
- Establish schema and data-contract standards across teams, and build tooling that lets researchers and engineers self-serve.
- Own reliability and performance of data pipelines in production, including observability and failure handling.
- Mentor engineers and lead technical design across the data domain.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- 4–6+ years of software / data engineering experience, including several years designing and operating large-scale data platforms in production.
- Deep experience with lakehouse architectures and technologies — e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Hudi; Parquet; Spark, Flink, Trino, DuckDB, or similar engines.
- Hands-on experience with vector databases and embedding retrieval (e.g., pgvector, Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate, Pinecone, LanceDB, or FAISS-based systems), including indexing trade-offs and scaling.
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Listed on Distributed Spectrum's Ashby job board; checked 22 h ago. First seen by us 24 h ago. Being listed doesn't mean the team is actively interviewing. We found this board in a public directory and haven't yet confirmed it against the company's own careers page.