Tech Lead - Data Platform Team

Surf AI is building the world’s first context-driven, agentic security platform. We focus on systems that don’t just surface risk, but actively help organizations resolve it.

Surf is backed by Cyberstarts and Boldstart Ventures, investors behind category-defining security companies, and founded by repeat entrepreneurs with deep experience in identity, security, and enterprise risk.

We’re a small, senior team working at the intersection of security, AI, and distributed systems. Our work blends agentic systems with data-driven analysis and applied security research to operate safely in real enterprise environments.

Who are we looking for?

As a Tech Lead, you’ll sit at the intersection of data engineering, ML systems, and platform architecture. You’ll own the patterns, guardrails, and data platform capabilities that let teams ship AI-native, low-latency experiences at scale safely, reliably, and cost-effectively.

What you'll do

• Own the data platform end-to-end: Design and operate batch and streaming pipelines (lakehouse, CDC, real-time ingestion) with strong data contracts, quality and lineage.
• Enable production AI/ML systems: Architect and support LLM and ML data pipelines - embeddings, vector search, RAG workflows, and real-time inference.
• Set architectural standards and guardrails: Define contract-first APIs and event schemas. Establish SLOs for latency freshness, reliability, and cost through design reviews and technical leadership.
• Design resilient distributed systems: Apply deep expertise in event-driven and microservices architectures, including backfill, idempotency, retries, and DLQs to scale safely.
• Modernize pragmatically: Guide adoption and best-practice use of Databricks, Kafka, Dagster, Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud-native services.
• Lead by influence: Mentor engineers, partner with Product, ML and Platform teams, and turn goals into clear architectures, execution plans, and measurable outcomes.

Required Skills & Experience

• Senior technical leadership: 5+ years operating as a Tech Lead, Data Architect in AI/ML-intensive or data-heavy systems, with ~10+ years of hands-on engineering experience overall.
• Distributed systems expertise: Deep understanding of microservices and event-driven architectures, including backpressure, idempotency, retries, DLQs, and contract-first API design.
• Data platform mastery: Proven experience across batch and streaming pipelines, lakehouse architectures, orchestration and data governance/lineage.
• Hands-on builder: Comfortable working with tools such as ClickHouse, Databricks, Airflow, Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud-native services on AWS, GCP, and Azure.
• Nice to have: Practical experience with LLM-based systems, embeddings, vector databases, RAG pipelines, and real-time production inference.

Why Join Us?
If you want to work on foundational systems, ship AI into production, and help define how agentic security actually operates, this is an opportunity to do it early and with real ownership.