Data Engineer, Reality Defender
$140-180k
Offers equity and bonus
Remote Fridays
Enterprise-grade deepfake detection
Be an early applicant
Enterprise-grade deepfake detection
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$140-180k
Offers equity and bonus
Remote Fridays
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
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and AWS, including deploying, scaling, and troubleshooting containerized workloads in production environments
- Proficiency with high-performance/distributed computing frameworks such as Spark and Ray for processing large-scale datasets
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Airflow (or comparable systems like Dagster, Prefect, or Luigi) to schedule and manage complex data pipelines
- Strong programming skills in Python and SQL; experience with Golang is a plus
- Demonstrated track record building and operating large-scale data processing pipelines, ideally handling multi-terabyte or streaming datasets
- Experience working with audio or video data at scale is a strong plus (e.g., transcoding, feature extraction, or preprocessing pipelines)
- Familiarity with common data transformation patterns applied to large datasets (ETL/ELT, batch and stream processing, data validation and quality checks)
- Experience designing and maintaining job orchestration systems, including dependency management, retries, monitoring, and alerting for production pipelines
- Bonus: experience orchestrating machine learning workflows (training pipelines, model retraining triggers, feature stores, or MLOps tooling)
What the job involves
- We're looking for a Data Engineer who can build and scale the infrastructure powering our data platform, with a strong foundation in distributed systems and cloud-native tooling
- You'll design and operate the pipelines that move, process, and prepare multi-terabyte and streaming datasets — including audio and video — for Reality Defender's detection models, and you'll work closely with ML engineers and researchers to keep that data flowing reliably at scale
- Design, build, and operate large-scale data processing pipelines handling multi-terabyte and streaming datasets, including audio/video transcoding, feature extraction, and preprocessing workflows
- Deploy, scale, and troubleshoot containerized workloads on Kubernetes and AWS in production environments
- Build and maintain distributed data processing jobs using frameworks such as Spark and Ray
- Design and operate workflow orchestration systems (e.g., Airflow) with dependency management, retries, monitoring, and alerting for production pipelines
- Administer and tune enterprise databases, including performance tuning, backup/recovery, access control, and scaling strategies
- Partner with ML engineers and researchers to support training pipelines, model retraining triggers, feature stores, and other MLOps workflows
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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