Data Engineer, Machine Learning

Responsibilities

• Partner with Product and Engineering to improve what the product records and help design and ship instrumentation in production systems.
• Build and maintain the path from canvas to warehouse to training set, ensuring data is clean, versioned, reliable, and reproducible.
• Implement systems that make examples traceable to their origin and training datasets reproducible over time.
• Build systems that reflect what can be captured and used under different enterprise agreements, with consent, isolation, and appropriate safeguards designed in from the beginning.
• Create appropriately governed and sanitized datasets that allow researchers to experiment safely and effectively.
• Design data systems that preserve context. Unpicked doesn't necessarily mean disliked, abandoned doesn't necessarily mean rejected, and our data should reflect the difference.
• Build checks, monitoring, and tooling that make it easier to identify gaps, inconsistencies, and unexpected changes before they affect research or training.

Days 1–30: Map

• Understand the event surface, warehouse, existing datasets, research workflows, and current data boundaries. Identify what exists, what's missing, and which research questions our data can't yet answer.
• Get comfortable with the existing pipeline and begin contributing improvements to data quality, reliability, or observability.
• Document the implementation and validate that the resulting dataset behaves as expected.
• Own a meaningful improvement to how we version, validate, trace, or govern ML data and contribute to the standards the team uses for dataset fingerprints, lineage, quality, and data boundaries.
• Identify follow-up opportunities based on what you've learned and begin taking ownership of a broader area of the ML data stack.

Requirements

• Experience building data infrastructure, ML data systems, or production data pipelines used by other teams.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience building reliable production systems.
• Experience designing data models and pipelines with reproducibility, observability, and lineage in mind.
• Comfort working with large or complex datasets and debugging issues across multiple parts of a data system.
• An experimental mindset and comfort working closely with researchers to turn ambiguous questions into measurable datasets.
• A collaborative approach to engineering, including documenting decisions, incorporating feedback, and working across Product, Engineering, and Research.

Preferred

• You've trained models yourself and understand what ML training pipelines actually need from their data.
• You've worked with preference data, labeling systems, human-feedback pipelines, or evaluation operations.
• You've built data infrastructure under meaningful privacy, security, or contractual constraints.
• You've worked with large-scale event or behavioral datasets.
• You have experience with data systems supporting generative AI or multimodal models.
• Above all, we're looking for someone who can look at the exhaust of a complex product and see
• High-quality professional preference data is difficult to create. You'll have the opportunity to build systems around a dataset and domain that few ML teams have access to.

The Role

As an

ML Data Engineer, you'll build and improve the systems that turn professional design work into training-grade preference data and training results back into a better product.

You'll work alongside the researchers consuming what you build, within the product systems where these signals originate, and across the data infrastructure where they ultimately land. Your closest users are the researchers sitting beside you, and you'll see quickly when a dataset you've built allows them to ask a question they couldn't ask before.

This is not a support role, and it isn't traditional offline ETL.

The pipelines you work on will run through a live product used every day by professional design teams, including enterprise customers with rigorous expectations around privacy and data protection. Capturing better signals without compromising user trust, contractual obligations, or product performance is a core part of the work.

If you want to train models without building the systems that feed them, this probably isn't the role for you. If you believe the next advances in ML will increasingly be won through better data, it might be.

We think about a dataset as a product: it has users, versions, provenance, and a quality bar. A training result should be reproducible from a dataset fingerprint months later, and "Where did this example come from?" should always have an answer.

Here, helping build that standard is the job.

Collection instruments

When historical signals aren't enough, help build mechanisms for gathering explicit feedback that designers actually want to use.

Data quality

This is a charter, not a week-one checklist. We don't expect one person to tackle everything at once. You'll work with the broader team to prioritize the areas where you can have the most impact and expand your scope over time.

What Your First 90 Days Could Look Like

Days 30–60: Ship

• Take one new signal end to end: instrumented in the product, landed reliably in the warehouse, versioned appropriately, and available to researchers.
• Days 60–90: Build the standard

What We're Looking For

• Good judgment around data quality, including an understanding of when the absence of a signal is meaningfully different from a negative signal.
• Comfort operating in an environment where the underlying systems and standards are still evolving.

Nice to Have

evidence

A unique dataset

The recorded decisions and workflows of more than 700,000 designers, with new signals generated every day.

Researchers as your users

You'll work directly alongside the people using the datasets you build, creating an unusually tight feedback loop between data engineering and research.

Meaningful ownership

You'll own substantive pieces of Vizcom's ML data infrastructure and have room to expand your scope as you build context and expertise.

Direct access to the founders

You'll work closely with Vizcom's founders and technical leadership as we build out our research and ML infrastructure.

Benefits at Vizcom

• 100% employer-sponsored medical coverage for employees, plus 25% coverage toward dependents
• Dental and vision coverage, plus mental health benefits
• Meaningful equity ownership
• Flexible PTO
• 401(k) with employer match
• Generous annual Learning & Development allowance
• Paid parental leave
• Weekly catered lunch at our San Francisco headquarters
• Monthly gym membership stipend

Compensation

Base salary for this role is $163,000 - $208,000 + equity

We regularly benchmark compensation against relevant peer companies using current market data from industry-standard sources, including Carta and Pave. This range reflects our Tier 1 compensation market, which includes San Francisco.

The actual offer and overall compensation package will be determined based on multiple factors, including relevant experience, skills, qualifications, and business considerations. The compensation and benefits described in this posting apply to U.S.-based W-2 employees and may vary based on applicable employment laws and requirements.

How We Work

• We document what we learned, not just what we worked on.
• Negative results are valuable when they help us close off the wrong paths.
• Results should be reproducible before they earn additional compute.
• We share meaningful research through technical write-ups, demonstrations, and showcases where appropriate.
• Our interview process emphasizes real-world problem solving and practical technical work rather than LeetCode-style interviews.

Location

This is an in-person role based in San Francisco, CA

Join Us

At Vizcom, we move quickly, give people meaningful ownership, and offer the opportunity to shape both our product and our company as we grow. We believe deeply in the craft of industrial design and in building tools that help designers bring better ideas into the physical world.

Join us in shaping a world designed by you.

A Note to Candidates and Recruiting Agencies

Please apply directly through this job posting. To help us keep our hiring process fair and organized, we ask candidates not to contact Vizcom employees directly regarding their application or candidacy.

Vizcom is not seeking assistance from external recruiting agencies or search firms for this role. Please do not contact or solicit Vizcom employees regarding recruiting services, candidate submissions, or agency partnerships. Unsolicited resumes or candidate profiles submitted by agencies will not create a fee obligation on behalf of Vizcom.

As part of Vizcom's SOC 2 Type II compliance program, employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check, as permitted by applicable law.