Lead Data Engineer - Identity Resolution

About the Role

Data isn't a support function at Vibe — it's the fuel behind every decision the platform makes, from which ad to show to how we measure its impact. You'll join the Data Platform team and lead the Identity squad, the group responsible for attaching every event Vibe observes to a real identity: the foundation for targeting, measurement, and the training data our models learn from. This is a player-coach role on a small, high-leverage team — you, a staff software engineer, and an ML engineer — and it exists because identity resolution at Vibe's scale has outgrown ad hoc ownership and needs someone who can both push the algorithms forward and set the technical direction. You'd want this job because you'll own one of the hardest, most consequential problems in the stack end to end; because you'll stay hands-on with clustering and entity resolution at real US scale rather than managing from a distance; and because you'll shape how identity evolves as the industry moves toward a privacy-first world.

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership

• Set the technical direction and roadmap for Vibe's identity stack end to end
• Design and build clustering algorithms and pipelines that resolve identity at US scale
• Make architecture decisions that scale economically and quantify their impact
• Anticipate scaling pain before it turns into an incident
• Drive systematic improvements to identity resolution accuracy

Reliability, Scale & Cost

• Build observability into identity pipelines with meaningful alerts and healthy SLOs
• Profile and optimize compute and storage across Dagster, Spark, and Iceberg
• Treat infrastructure spend as a first-class engineering concern

Expanding the Stack

• Extend identity capabilities into richer audience construction and attribution
• Build platform-level tooling so every team can resolve identity behind their events
• Design identity approaches built for a privacy-first future

People & Partnership

• Lead the squad's senior engineer through 1:1s, feedback, and career development
• Represent identity in cross-team Data Platform roadmap decisions
• Translate ambiguous stakeholder requests into concrete technical deliverables
• Push back on requests where the right call is "not yet" or "not this way"

What You Need

• 8+ years building and operating production ML or data systems, including leading technical work as a tech lead, staff engineer, or team lead
• Hands-on experience with large-scale entity resolution, clustering, or graph problems, with the ability to own and challenge the algorithms themselves
• Strong distributed-systems foundations across a modern orchestrator (e.g. Dagster), distributed compute (e.g. Spark), and large-scale storage (e.g. Iceberg)
• A track record of building evaluation frameworks and using them to drive measurable algorithmic improvements
• Experience managing performance and cost at genuinely large data scale
• Strong cross-functional communication, with the ability to adjust detail level by audience and align stakeholders with conflicting priorities

Nice to Haves

• Experience in streaming TV advertising or programmatic advertising

Our Values

At Vibe, we run on three values: Impact, Ambition, and Urgency. We tie every goal to a real business outcome, think 10x rather than settling for good enough, and move daily rather than waiting for perfect conditions.

You'll thrive here if you own outcomes without needing direction, default to action, and hold yourself to results, not effort.

This is a high-performance environment with high-performance rewards: you'll work alongside people who push you, with real ownership over hard problems in a market that's moving fast.

If that sounds like the best version of your career, we want to meet you.