Build Ai

Lead Engineer, ML Data Infrastructure & Systems

San Francisco, California, United States · On-site · FullTime

USD 220,000–350,000/year

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About the role

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EmployerBuild Ai
LocationSan Francisco, California, United States
Work styleOn-site
Employment typeFullTime
Employer posted1 month ago
Salary (as stated by the employer)USD 220,000 – 350,000 per year

About Build AI

Build AI is the data hyperscaler for Physical AI. We're vertically integrated across hardware, manufacturing, logistics, collection, and model training to scale the physical labor dataset orders of magnitude faster than anyone in the world.

Job Summary

We’re hiring a lead for the data platform: camera on a worker to training-ready datasets, and out to research customers. Collection is monocular 1920×1080p 30fps in the wild, targeting 100M hours. The roles we mean: Tesla Autopilot, Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Nuro, Samsara, Verkada, Netflix encoding, YouTube ingest, Scale, Eventual/Daft. This is not a warehouse, analytics, or generic backend seat.

Key Responsibilities

Own the data platform end-to-end: on-device capture, upload under flaky bandwidth, object storage, training-ready shards

Compression, codecs, and storage-tier trade-offs so 1080p30 hours stay cheap enough to keep collecting

Show full description

Upload that survives bad networks: on-device buffering, batching, retries, a drop rate you can actually see

Object storage and training-shard formats. The hard problem is petabyte-scale media, not a warehouse

Own dataset packaging, versioning, and delivery to external research customers

Work with Shenzhen firmware so new devices speak one ingest contract, not a custom path per SKU

Make health, cost, and drop rate obvious as we add sites and countries

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

You have owned a production media or sensor data path at real scale: object storage at petabyte scale, video codecs and compression, upload under flaky bandwidth, or training-shard / dataset formats

That kind of data path: Tesla Autopilot, Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Nuro, Samsara, Verkada, Netflix encoding, YouTube ingest, Scale, or Eventual/Daft. Demo-scale ETL is not this job

Strong software engineering. Python and at least one systems language. Linux

You measure cost and throughput, not whether the demo uploaded

You want to scale in-the-wild physical-labor video, not run a generic data org

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

Pose, multi-camera, or other large media besides video

Cloud (AWS or GCP), orchestration (Kubernetes, Airflow, Temporal), or IaC

Dataset management or annotation tooling

You have shipped dataset delivery to external research or training customers

Benefits

Competitive pay

Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage

$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office

Relocation support for those moving to San Francisco (Financial District) or Shenzhen (Nanshan)

Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more

Daily lunch and dinner in our office

Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

Unlimited Codex and Claude credits

Travel

How we're different

Build believes in the Bitter Lesson. By taking a general approach of learning from humans, our addressable market is all physical labor.

We are a fully in-person team in San Francisco (Financial District) and Shenzhen (Nanshan), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.

Build AI is an equal opportunity employer. We review every application. If you do not meet every bullet, still apply. Questions: research@build.ai

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