---
title: 'Data Infra Engineer at BLD Talent'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-infra-engineer-bld-talent-san-francisco-80nm1a9j23kk'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Data Infra Engineer at BLD Talent

- **Company:** BLD Talent
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $110k–$175k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-12-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/bld-talent/am9icG9zdDrFaWhGXxRIZc3ZEousBUD4

## Job description

Company Overview We’re building intelligent robotic arms that can learn new skills in hours, not months. Backed by Y Combinator and top-tier Silicon Valley investors, we’re turning physical AI into reality, helping industries facing critical labor shortages (manufacturing, logistics, and more) automate back-of-house tasks like packaging, kitting, and assembly. Our flagship robot combines affordable robotic hardware with cutting-edge imitation learning algorithms, enabling reliable, sample-efficient robots that deliver customer value from day one. We’re already live with pilot partners and scaling fast. The founding team brings experience from Apple, Stanford, and Microsoft, with deep expertise in robotics, embodied AI, and large-scale machine learning.

## The Role

We’re looking for a Robotics Data Infrastructure Engineer to own and build the data systems that power our robots in the real world. This is a hands-on founding engineer role with true ownership and freedom — your work will directly impact robots performing customer-critical tasks every day. You will architect and deploy data pipelines on both AWS and edge devices, manage large-scale multi-modal datasets (images, video, time-series, text, etc.), and build the tooling that connects real-world robot data to training and evaluation workflows. You’ll work across the full robotics software stack, from ingesting sensor data and telemetry, to enabling large-scale policy learning pipelines that drive production robots. Beyond writing great code, you’ll help drive technical decisions, lead cross-functional efforts, and bridge robotics, machine learning, and product requirements into scalable, reliable systems.

## What You’ll Do

- Build and own our data backbone on AWS: Design and run cloud + edge pipelines using services like IoT Core, S3, ECR, Batch, ECS/EKS, and Step Functions. Your work keeps robot data flowing reliably and cost-efficiently from the field into the lab.
- Develop on-device data systems: Build robust, fault-tolerant data capture on edge PCs using MCAP/Protobuf, with clean schema contracts, buffering, and resumable uploads to the cloud.
- Wrangle massive multimodal datasets: Organize and version millions of images, videos, time-series (robot state, force/torque), and annotations. Enforce metadata, retention, and access patterns that scale.
- Build MLOps and DataOps pipelines: Automate data validation, labeling, augmentation, and model training/evaluation using containerized jobs and orchestrators like Batch, Step Functions, Airflow, or Prefect.
- Ensure data quality and health: Create ingestion checks, schema validation, deduping, drift detection, and real-time alerting around data freshness and completeness.
- Build internal tools that unblock others: Develop UIs/CLIs for browsing data, launching jobs, tracking experiments, and debugging robots in the field. Integrate with tools like Foxglove.
- Work across teams: Partner with hardware, ML, and product to turn raw field data into smarter robots and real customer value—fast.

## Qualifications

- B.S., M.S., Ph.D. in computer science or related fields.
- Strong programming skills in Python (you write clean, efficient, production-ready code)
- Strong experience in AWS
- Systems engineering skills (networking, concurrency, performance)
- At least 2 years of full-time work experience for candidates with a B.S. in related fields. 1 year of experience for M.S. or Ph.D. candidates.

## About BLD Talent

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: BLD Talent is a solo-operated technical recruiting firm that places software, product, AI/ML, and hardware talent at growth-stage and AI-native startups.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped – no external funding)
- **Headquarters**: United States (remote/nationwide recruiting)
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Dylan Raphael

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Staffing and Recruiting (specialized in technical and product hiring)
- **Target customers**: Seed to Series C startups, small-to-medium companies, and growth-stage teams needing high-stakes engineering and product hires.
- **Mission/purpose**: Help startups translate their vision into teams that ship – by identifying, engaging, and closing the right technical talent with speed and signal.

## Products & Services
- **[Technical Recruiting Service]**: End-to-end search for Senior Engineers, Staff SWE, AI/ML Engineers, Product Managers (Head of Product, Sr. Technical PM), and Hardware/Robotics roles. Uses AI-powered sourcing and a solo-operator model for accountability. Offers three engagement models:
  - **Embedded**: $5K retainer + 21.5% of first-year base; best when a company needs a dedicated recruiter without hiring internally.
  - **Contingent**: 20–25% of first-year base, paid on accept, no retainer, 60-day close target.
  - **Retained**: For VP/Head-level searches; one-third upfront, one-third at interview volume milestone, one-third on accept.
- **[Replacement Guarantee]**: If a placed hire leaves within a specified period (e.g., first week), BLD Talent delivers a free replacement in under 3 weeks.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not applicable (bootstrapped solo operation)
- **Key Metric**: Estimated annual revenue ~$171,110 (per Prospeo.io) with ~$86,000 revenue per employee (founder-only headcount). Total funding: $0.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: No investors. Clients include MagicSchool AI (Series B), a stealth agentic AI startup ($6M raised), and other VC-backed companies.
- **Growth Signals**: Founded in 2025 and already delivered 6 critical engineering hires in under 90 days for an agentic AI startup. Founder’s personal track record: 134 offers at Amazon (top 15% of senior ICs). Active hiring campaigns for stealth AI startups backed by top-tier VCs.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Solo operator model**: Founder Dylan Raphael runs every search personally – no handoffs, single point of contact from calibration to close.
- **AI-native sourcing**: Uses modern AI tooling to operate at “team-level output,” enabling personalized outreach at scale (e.g., 2,000+ outreaches for one engagement).
- **High signal pipeline**: Focuses on fewer, better candidates; reported 100% offer acceptance for a recent client (MagicSchool AI).
- **Replacement guarantee**: Stands behind hires with a clear, time-bound replacement policy.
- **Track record at Amazon**: 236 final-round interviews, 134 offers, 92 accepts – demonstrates ability to assess and close top-tier talent.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Deepen presence in the AI-native startup ecosystem (seed through Series C). Continue to build a reputation for speed and fit in high-stakes engineering and product roles. Expand into hardware/robotics recruiting as demand grows.
- **Growth direction**: Remain a solo boutique firm to preserve accountability and quality, while leveraging AI tooling to scale personal output.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Founder-led, high ownership, transparent, and results-driven. Dylan Raphael describes himself as “AI-native” and brings the same tooling mindset to recruiting that modern engineering teams use.
- **Work environment**: Remote-first with nationwide recruiting. Clients are typically in-office hybrid (e.g., Palo Alto 3+ days/week), but the recruiter operates remotely.
- **Notable perks**: For job seekers, BLD Talent offers a focused, high-signal process that protects interviewer time. Candidates get honest, calibrated feedback and a partner who stays involved through offer and negotiation.
- **Engineering culture**: The firm itself is a solo operation, but the roles it fills are at startups building AI products, developer platforms, and modern productivity tools – appealing to engineers who want to ship fast and have impact.

## Sources
1. [bldtalent.com](https://bldtalent.com)
2. [linkedin.com/company/bld-talent](https://linkedin.com/company/bld-talent)
3. [prospeo.io](https://prospeo.io/c/bld-talent)
4. [LinkedIn post – Hiring Founding Engineers](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bld-talent_hiring-founding-engineers-stealth-ai-activity-7341576767976968194-c5LT)

## Other roles at BLD Talent

- [Data Infra Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/data-infra-engineer-waymo-mountain-view-r113zn0mc2yp) — Mountain View, CA