VP of Data Platform & Engineering

About this Role

As VP of Data Platform & Engineering, you own the substrate under every other data pillar.

You will:

• Kill the single-gatekeeper deploy model and replace it with a real deploy regime where production access carries responsibility.

• Define gold-certification by code, so quality is promoted by written criteria, never declared by hand.

• Build and run the platform as a portfolio of data products with clear contracts to the domain teams.

• Own data security and governance: take the our key data products to general availability, enforce least privilege, and retire ad-hoc database credentials.

• Stand up observability so we can see what the platform is doing, not guess.

What You'll Work On

• Building the deploy regime that lets every engineer ship without a single point of failure.

• Implementing the medallion architecture with gold certified by code, and separating pipeline state from food facts.

• Enable access to data products through MCPs and other AI friendly interfaces that honor our security and governance posture.

• Building operational excellence within our data practices at WISEcode.

• Building a reusable/plugable entity-resolution service to replace one-off fixes.

• Running the platform as automated, agentic workflows with your own development harnesses.

• Managing data engineering ICs.

What Success Looks Like

Within the first several months, you have:

• Removed the deploy bottleneck and unblocked the rest of the data org.

• Defined and enforced gold-certification-by-code.

• Implemented our core promotion and release operation.

• Given the org visibility into platform health it did not have before.

Over time, success means WISEcode data is queryable by a person or an agent without tribal knowledge, trustworthy enough to survive an audit, and shipped on a cadence measured in days.

AI Skills and Mindset

WISEcode is an AI-native company, and this role sets the bar for what that means in engineering.

You will:

• Build automated, agentic pipelines rather than only manual runbooks.

• Operate with your own AI development harness and raise the standard for your team an the wider organization.

• Design the platform so employees get the full power of frontier models without exposing the corpus.

• Treat probabilistic systems with architectural guardrails, not trust in behavior.

We are not looking for someone who treats AI as novelty. We are looking for someone who treats it as infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, data platform, or infrastructure, including team leadership.

• A track record of building data products and teams from zero to one.

• Deep command of data contracts, medallion or equivalent quality architecture, and promotion discipline.

• Strong data-security judgment: least privilege, trust boundaries, and access control.

• Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic engineering as a primary way of working.

• Strong SQL and systems-thinking across UI, API, database, and infrastructure boundaries.

• Ability to operate in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience with MCPs, capability layers, or API-first data access patterns.

• Experience with observability tooling and production diagnostics.

• Experience with Postgres, DuckDB or MotherDuck, and cloud infrastructure.

• Experience building internal developer tooling or data-product platforms.

Why Join WISEcode?

• Own the platform and security foundation for one of the most ambitious food intelligence platforms in the world.

• Convert the org's worst bottleneck into its strongest, most defensible capability.

• Work directly with the CDO on the architecture and operation that protects the company's core asset.

• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and rapid impact.

• Solve real problems at the intersection of AI, data, security, and human health.