Staff Data Platform Engineer, Reality Defender
$210-260k
+ Equity and bonus
Enterprise-grade deepfake detection
Be an early applicant
Enterprise-grade deepfake detection
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$210-260k
+ Equity and bonus
21-100 employees
Company mission
To help companies, governments, and journalists determine if media is real or fake, focusing on audio, video and image manipulation.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years building data platforms or data infrastructure, including staff- or lead-level ownership of production pipelines that generate, ingest, or deliver data at high volume
- Deep hands-on experience with distributed processing (Spark, Ray, or similar) and lakehouse platforms, ideally Databricks, on top of cloud object storage (S3, GCS, or Azure Blob)
- Production experience with Databricks, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and Spark on AWS, including performance tuning, access controls, and operational troubleshooting
- Experience working with large unstructured media such as video, audio, or images, including the realities of large files, decoding and transcoding, and metadata at scale
- A track record of building reproducible ML datasets: versioning, lineage, data quality validation, and orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Databricks Workflows, or similar)
- Strong Python and SQL, and the judgment to own ambiguous platform problems end-to-end on a lean team
- Own infrastructure and deployment automation using Terraform and CI/CD, including AWS storage, IAM, compute, Databricks resources, and distributed processing environments
- Experience building synthetic data generation pipelines or running generative models (diffusion, voice cloning/TTS, video generation) at scale. (nice to have)
- Background supporting ML research teams with training and evaluation data, especially for multimodal models. (nice to have)
- Experience in security, fraud, trust & safety, or another adversarial domain, or at a Series A or B startup where scope regularly outpaces headcount. (nice to have)
What the job involves
- Own the end-to-end data platform for AI research: continuous ingestion, preprocessing, governance, and export of image, video, audio, and text data at high volume
- Complete and scale our Databricks lakehouse and distributed processing stack (Spark, Ray, or similar), making architecture and build-vs-buy decisions that hold up as data volume grows
- Build reusable infrastructure for in-house synthetic data generation, so researchers can produce new deepfake variants across modalities on demand instead of one-off
- Make every dataset reproducible and traceable through versioning, lineage, metadata, quality checks, and stable train/eval splits, so any model result can be tied back to the exact data behind it
- Own pipeline reliability, observability, and processing cost per dataset as core metrics of the platform
- Partner with ML researchers to understand their data needs and turn them into self-serve tools that speed up model iteration
- Mentor engineers and raise the bar on data engineering practices: code review, testing, documentation, and runbooks
- Work with Security and compliance stakeholders to make sure data handling, licensing, and access controls meet the standards our enterprise and government clients expect
- Help shape the long-term data platform roadmap with engineering and research leadership
- Within 12 months, you'll…
- Own a mature, self-serve data platform that researchers use to create, version, and export datasets without waiting on platform support
- Have scaled synthetic data generation across vision, audio, and multimodal research, broadening our detection coverage of new generative techniques
- Deliver reproducible evaluation datasets that let the company compare model versions with confidence
- Be setting the multi-year data platform roadmap and leading high-leverage initiatives beyond the original scope
Our take
Reality Defender was born out of The AI Foundation to help protect the 2020 US Elections from the threat of deepfakes. It officially launched as a company in 2021, based in New York. Today there continues to be a genuine issue where the public cannot decipher what is true or false online due to the existence of easily-created deepfakes.
Reality Defender's platform empowers enterprises to highlight and flag fraudulent users and content found online. Its API and app also provide risk scoring, reporting, and forensics review.
Reality Defender was selected as part of Y Combinator’s 2022 batch, the same backing received by Monzo, Airbnb and Stripe in their early days. This backing, paired with the founding team’s experience of over twenty years at Google, Goldman Sachs, and the Intelligence Community, as well as its 2023 award win, has worked well for this early-stage startup.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Company benefits
- Healthcare plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and partial coverage available for dependents
- Dental and Vision plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and their dependents
- Short/Long-term disability and life insurance plans with 100% premium coverage for employees
- FSA/HSA and 401k programs
- Equity compensation
- 20 days of PTO per year
- 12 weeks of Parental Leave
- Learning and Development budget
- Monthly wellness benefits
- Annual company-sponsored offsite
Company HQ
Manhattan, New York, NY
Leadership
Gaurav Bharaj
(Co-Founder & Advisor)Previously the Chief Science Officer at Flawless, the Vice President of Research for The AI Foundation and a Senior Researcher for Technicolor.
Ali Shahriyari
(Co-Founder & Advisor)Previously acted as the Director of Product for The AI Foundation and as a Vice President for Originate.
Ben Colman
(Co-Founder & CEO)Co-founded PlaceAVote. Previously acted as NYC Lead for Xoogler.co, CEO for Convertix, and Vice President for Goldman Sachs.
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