Lead data engineer

About

We're ooak data.

The promise of AI agents is still unmet in complex, real-world business environments. Our mission is to make it possible for agents to reliably accomplish concrete and useful tasks.

That's why we're building Alexandria, the world's largest library of real-world business workflow datasets.

Over the next 6 months, we'll acquire and anonymize 300+ full data ecosystems from real-world companies. This will allow us to

  • become the leader of real business workflow data

  • be in the best position to launch our own data research lab in early 2027, enabling new services that help companies around the world automate their workflows with AI

We need to build our elite squad to move extremely fast and confirm our leading position on company data.

🤝 Our values

  • Trust, the foundation of every relationship, internal and external. We extend it by default and value the ownership that comes with it.

  • Ambition, we commit, we move fast, with tenacity and efficiency.

  • Collective, team first, low ego.

  • Kindness, at the heart of every interaction.

We're building a solid, aligned, and motivated team.

Job Description

📍 Paris (city center), on-site with 1 to 2 days WFH

🕐 Start: as soon as you are available

💼 Contract: full-time (CDI), open to freelancing for the summer

👥 Team:

  • 3 co-founders (Pierre-Louis, CEO; Grégoire, CPO & COO; Thomas, CTO)

  • 6 FTEs: 3 ML engineer and 3 ops + 5 freelances

✅ Your missions

As Lead Data Engineer and a founding member of the tech team, you'll play a central role in how we design, structure, and scale the data foundations behind our products. You'll report directly to Thomas (CTO & co-founder).

For the first 6 to 12 months, this is a hands-on role: you build the pipelines yourself. As the team grows around you, the role opens up into leading it — and we'll expect you to have earned that by shipping, not by organising.

  • Design, build, and scale our data ingestion, transformation, and structuring pipelines at scale.

  • Contribute across every stage of our data platform:

    • the anonymization pipeline (combining algorithmic approaches with human verification) to build digital twins of companies.
    • the multi-modal data enrichment & curation pipeline.
    • the datasets feeding our reinforcement learning (RL) environments.

  • Ensure data quality, lineage, versioning, and observability across the whole stack.

  • Define our technical standards and take an active part in the structuring architecture decisions (tech choices, design patterns, scalability, DataOps).

  • Work closely with the product, ML, and business teams to scope and ship new data projects.

  • Hire, mentor, and grow the future members of the data team, building a strong data engineering culture at Ooak Data, with the option to take formal management of it once it's in place.

Preferred Experience

🔍 Who we're looking for

  • 8-15 years of experience in data engineering or data-intensive software development.

  • Strong coding experience in Python and SQL, with a plus for Rust or TypeScript.

  • Expertise building ETL/ELT pipelines and orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, dbt, or equivalent).

  • Experience with data warehouses and lakes (BigQuery, Snowflake, or equivalent) and streaming tools (Pub/Sub, Kafka).

  • DataOps know-how: versioning, monitoring, data quality and testing.

  • Proven track record delivering projects in an agile, collaborative environment.

  • Genuine desire to mentor and grow more junior profiles over time.

  • Demonstrated ability to thrive in a demanding, fast-growing environment.

  • Excellent analytical skills, attention to detail, and strong prioritization.

  • Fluent English, mandatory (working language with our clients and the labs).

The extras that make the difference

  • Experience with GCP (or equivalent), Modal or GPU cluster and serverless technologies.

  • Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation).

  • Strong interest in data anonymization, multi-modality, and RL environments.

Recruitment Process

Why join us

  • Entrepreneurial adventure, play a key role and live the early days of an ambitious company, right at the front line of the AI revolution.

  • Backed by Y Combinator, join just as we accelerate.

  • Founding impact, shape the company and its culture from day one.

  • Offices in central Paris + 1 to 2 days WFH.

  • Perks:

    • Alan health insurance (mutuelle)
    • Unlimited GPT & Claude tokens
    • 50% Navigo covered

Additional Information

  • Contract Type: Full-Time
  • Location: Paris
  • Experience: > 7 years
  • Occasional remote authorized
  • Salary: between 80000€ and 100000€ / year
Apply Now

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