Job description

About the Role We're looking for a Data Engineer who wants to operate like a founder. Not someone who wants to spend their time maintaining dashboards, moving tickets across a board, or optimizing pipelines in a mature environment. Someone who sees infrastructure as a product, thrives in ambiguity, and wants to build the systems that power the next generation of AI applications. This is not a traditional data engineering role. You'll own critical pieces of the infrastructure that power our AI workers, customer data platform, and future data architecture. You'll work across data engineering, backend systems, infrastructure, and AI, building foundational systems that directly impact how our products behave in the real world. The best people for this role think in systems, move with urgency, and use AI as leverage. Location is flexible—we’re hiring in San Francisco (in-office) and remotely throughout the U.S. and Canada. Why this role is different The role of data engineering is changing. As AI becomes more capable, the bottleneck increasingly shifts from models to data. The best AI systems aren't defined by the model they're using. They're defined by what they know, what they can access, and how effectively they can retrieve and reason over information. At 11x, we're building AI workers that operate on behalf of our customers. For those workers to become more useful, more autonomous, and more intelligent, they need access to the right data at the right time. Every improvement in data access, retrieval, enrichment, synchronization, and infrastructure directly improves the capabilities of our agents. That means the systems you build won't sit behind the scenes. They'll determine what our AI workers can understand, what actions they can take, and how much value they can deliver. The quality of our AI workers is ultimately constrained by the quality of the data systems behind them. You'll be responsible for pushing that frontier forward. We believe the future belongs to engineers who: • think like owners • build systems that scale beyond themselves • use AI tools fluently • care about outcomes, not just implementation • move quickly through ambiguity • enjoy building foundational infrastructure from first principles If that excites you, you'll probably love working here. What You'll Do • Own and extend our customer data ingestion platform • Build and maintain large-scale data pipelines powering AI products and customer workflows • Design systems for syncing customer data across external platforms, CRMs, and third-party systems • Help architect our future data lake, retrieval layer, and data infrastructure strategy • Build ingestion and querying systems for lead, account, enrichment, and customer knowledge data • Create the infrastructure that gives our AI workers access to the information they need to reason, act, and improve over time • Partner closely with product and engineering teams to unlock new AI product capabilities • Improve reliability, observability, performance, and scalability across our data stack • Contribute across backend systems and infrastructure, not just traditional data engineering projects • Push ideas into production quickly instead of over-optimizing in planning phases What We're Looking For • 4+ years of software engineering or data engineering experience • Strong experience building and maintaining production-grade data systems and pipelines • Experience with Python and Typescript • Strong backend engineering fundamentals beyond traditional data engineering • High agency — you naturally move things forward without waiting for direction • Comfort operating in ambiguity and building without a playbook • Strong systems thinking and architectural intuition • Ability to balance speed with long-term scalability • Strong problem-solving skills and a willingness to own problems end-to-end • Hungry to grow. You want expanding scope, responsibility, and ownership over time • Excitement about AI-native workflows and the future of software development Nice to Have • Experience with ClickHouse or other columnar databases • Experience building customer data platforms (CDPs) • Experience with Airbyte or similar data integration and ingestion platforms • Experience with CRM integrations and synchronization systems • Experience designing data lake architecture • Experience supporting AI or ML products • You've used tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar heavily in your workflow • You care deeply about engineering velocity and iteration speed What Success Looks Like You help us: • Build the data foundation that powers our AI workers • Give our agents access to the information they need to reason and act effectively • Unlock new product capabilities through better retrieval, enrichment, and infrastructure • Move faster without sacrificing reliability • Turn complex data problems into elegant systems • Create a culture where engineering is deeply tied to ownership, execution, and outcomes This is a role for someone who wants an unusual amount of ownership, autonomy, and leverage. If you're excited by the idea of building the infrastructure behind AI products, shaping core systems from the ground up, and using AI to dramatically expand what one person can build — we'd love to talk. Compensation Base salary range: $170,000-$200,000 *Final offer will be based on a variety of factors, including role level, relevant experience, skills, and job-related expertise. 11x is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

Requirements

Must-haves

The best people for this role think in systems, move with urgency, and use AI as leverage.
Location is flexible—we’re hiring in San Francisco (in-office) and remotely throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Why this role is different
At 11x, we're building AI workers that operate on behalf of our customers. For those workers to become more useful, more autonomous, and more intelligent, they need access to the right data at the right time.
The quality of our AI workers is ultimately constrained by the quality of the data systems behind them. You'll be responsible for pushing that frontier forward.
We believe the future belongs to engineers who:
think like owners
build systems that scale beyond themselves
use AI tools fluently
care about outcomes, not just implementation
move quickly through ambiguity
enjoy building foundational infrastructure from first principles
If that excites you, you'll probably love working here.
Own and extend our customer data ingestion platform
Build and maintain large-scale data pipelines powering AI products and customer workflows

Nice-to-haves

Experience with ClickHouse or other columnar databases
Experience building customer data platforms (CDPs)
Experience with Airbyte or similar data integration and ingestion platforms
Experience with CRM integrations and synchronization systems
Experience designing data lake architecture
Experience supporting AI or ML products
You've used tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar heavily in your workflow
You care deeply about engineering velocity and iteration speed
What Success Looks Like

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

aidesign systemspythontypescriptml

Platform: gem
Effort: medium