Senior Data Engineer

About Us

Figure Eight is the essential Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning platform for data science and machine learning teams. The Figure Eight platform transforms unstructured text, image, audio, and video data into customized high-quality training data to make AI work in the real world. Figure Eight's technology and expertise supports a wide range of use cases including autonomous vehicles, intelligent personal assistants, medical image labeling, consumer product identification, content categorization, customer support ticket classification, social data insight, CRM data enrichment, product categorization, and search relevance.
Headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Canvas Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Industry Ventures, Microsoft Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, Figure Eight serves Fortune 500 and fast-growing data-driven organizations across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.figure-eight.com.

About the Role

Figure Eight users range from engineers and data scientists to subject matter experts creating training data for machine learning. You will be working on the most important problems in technology today: how can humans and AI collaborate to solve important and sometimes complicated tasks? 

As a member of our core team, you will design, build, and improve on tools used by many of the most widely-known tech companies with large-scale machine learning initiatives active today. This may include collecting and managing training data for AI models, evaluating the performance of the machine learning models used by that data, or building infrastructure and managing data pipelines. Specifically, you will work on a generalized annotation API that consists of both automated and human-driven annotation tools for 2D and 3D images, video, text, and audio data. The platform will combine human input (eg: bounding boxes on objects) and Machine Learning input (eg: automatic object tracking in videos) for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. You will be on a cross-functional team collaborating with members of the Product, Machine Learning, Dev Ops, and Backend Engineering teams. 

 Your work will consist of implementing new features and services, maintaining infrastructure, and migrating existing services to a SOA/microservice-based architecture. You’ll mentor less experienced developers and constantly work on improving your own skills and the quality of our code-base. For more about what we build, please visit www.figure-eight.com/overview

The Ideal Candidate:

You enjoy thinking about and working on enterprise-level data management systems. You are looking for a company at the epicenter of a rapidly-developing machine learning industry and are driven by a hunger to learn and develop your skills. You are passionate about working on a project that contributes meaningfully to the further development of technology and to humanity as a whole. You care about best practices and you choose the tools you work with judiciously and deliberately. You have strong analytical skills, an unwavering commitment to quality, an open-minded and collaborative work ethic, and cutting-edge coding skills. 

Responsibilities / Opportunities:

• Build & maintain low-latency, high-scalability data pipelines in service of our human-in-the-loop machine learning workflows platform. 

• Build & maintain adapter services for ingesting data from a wide variety of streaming and batch-based sources. 

• Build & maintain services for throttling, backpressure, schema management, and normalization. 

• Implement QA and testing strategies. Promote best practices for writing maintainable code. 

• Participate in selecting tools and setting development standards at Figure Eight.

• Ability/readiness to develop excellent working relationships with a diverse team of peers across organizations (Engineering, QA, DevOps, Product, Design, et al). 

Competencies: 

• 5+ years of software development experience in cloud-based, multi-tiered, enterprise application systems. 

• 5+ years managing data platforms/engineering using enterprise service bus or message-based architectures, such as Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ, or similar.

• 3+ years production environment-level experience with Ruby on Rails application development. 

• Hands-on experience with developing microservices and successfully building products using SOA. 

• Hands-on experience with event-sourcing and functional programming patterns. 

• Hands-on experience with AWS, Git, Docker, Gradle, Jenkins, Jira, and Confluence. 

Nice-to-have Competencies: 

• Familiarity with batch processing and workflow tools such as Airflow, Luigi, Celery, or others

• Prior production experience with Python, Java, and/or Scala. 

• Familiarity with basic machine learning concepts. 

Figure Eight offers an attractive total compensation package including outstanding benefits and stock options. Learn more about our culture at https://www.figure-eight.com/company/careers/.