--- title: 'Founding Data Engineer at Braintrust' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-data-engineer-braintrust-san-francisco-n7xay01y9ycv' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-17' --- # Founding Data Engineer at Braintrust - **Company:** Braintrust - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-07-13 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/braintrust/d1756ad8-be7c-4acd-961e-7e81e4f69024 ## Job description ## About the company Braintrust is the agent observability platform. By actively applying intelligence to agent traces and automatically surfacing the most critical patterns, Braintrust gives teams the visibility to understand how agents behave in production and the tools to improve them. Teams at Notion, Stripe, Box, OpenAI, and Cloudflare use Braintrust to trace their agents, find the issues in their observability data, and run evals that tell them how to improve. ## About the Role Braintrust is growing quickly across enterprise and self-serve customers, and our internal systems need to scale with us. You will establish our data foundation, make architectural decisions, work directly with our executive team, and help shape the data function as it grows. This is a founding, hands on role. You will decide what good looks like, and be able to build it. The core of the job is analytics engineering. That means defining the business entities and metrics the company runs on, modeling them so they can be trusted, and making them accessible without a data person in the loop. Around that core, you will own the ingestion pipelines that feed it, the architecture decisions that hold it together, and the reliability of the whole path. You'll partner with stakeholders across the business, and directly with executives. You will work with Product and Engineering on usage data and event schemas, with Finance on revenue and consumption reporting, and with Sales, RevOps, and Marketing on the pipeline and customer data they operate from. ## What You Will Do - Define the business entities, metrics, and semantics that Product, Finance, and GTM all build on - Design and build the core data models in SQL and dbt - Build and own ingestion from product events, CRM, and other business systems, including vendor APIs, webhooks, and sync gaps - Make architectural decisions by determining how storage, orchestration, and transformation evolve from here - Stand up self-serve analytics that includes building semantic models and trusted metrics that stakeholders can query without filing a ticket - Partner with Engineering and Product on usage data and event schemas as the product surface grows - Treat governance and reliability as part of the data model - Use AI to accelerate your own build, and keep the foundation clean and well-described enough that AI tooling on top of it has something reliable to stand on. Where You’ll Work in the Stack: - Ingestion: Product events, CRM, and other business data sources - Modeling: SQL, dbt, business entities, and shared metric definitions - Storage and orchestration: The current environment includes Snowflake; you’ll help determine how the architecture evolves - Analytics: Semantic models and self-serve access to trusted metrics - Governance and reliability: Data quality, access controls, lineage, monitoring, and debugging ## About You - You've defined business entities and metrics, and built the models behind them - Strong command of SQL and dbt, and experience with a cloud warehouse (Snowflake or equivalent) and an orchestrator (Dagster, Airflow, or similar) - Enough engineering depth to own pipelines end to end. You can write and maintain production code, not only transformation models. - Clear judgment about data modeling, schema evolution, contracts, and lineage - Strong debugging instincts across a multi-system path, and the patience to trace a wrong number to its source - Ability to work directly with executives and functional leaders: clarifying vague requests, explaining how the data works, and negotiating priorities and tradeoffs - Comfort operating as the only data hire, balancing foundational architecture against urgent business needs Bonus Points - You've built a data foundation from scratch, rather than inheriting a mature one - Startup experience, especially as an early or first data hire - Experience across multiple business functions that includes Product, Finance, and GTM - Familiarity with usage-based pricing, consumption models, or PLG-plus-sales-assisted funnels - Experience with our stack, or close equivalents: Snowflake, dbt, Dagster, AWS Batch/Lambda, Fivetran, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Soda, or semantic-layer tools like Omni or Looker - You've built or used agents for internal workflows and analysis - Braintrust user :) What Success Looks Like - Braintrust has a governed set of core entities and metrics that Product, Finance, and GTM all build on - Product usage data is reliable enough that people act on it without checking it against something else first - Stakeholders can answer their own questions through trusted, self-serve models - Every automated decision and every metric has a traceable path back to its source - The foundation is documented and maintainable. Simple enough for a startup team to run solo, structured enough to hand to a larger data team as it grows. ## Benefits include - Medical, dental, and vision insurance - Daily lunch, snacks, and beverages - Flexible time off - Competitive salary and equity - Wifi & cellphone stipend ## Equal opportunity Braintrust is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. ## About Braintrust ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Braintrust provides an enterprise-grade AI observability and evaluation platform that helps teams measure, evaluate, and improve AI products in production. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2023 - **Founders**: Ankur Goyal ## Core Business - **Primary Industry**: AI Observability & Evaluation / Software Development - **Target Customers**: B2B, primarily engineering and product teams at enterprises and digital-native companies building AI-powered products. - **Mission/Purpose**: To empower developers and product managers to ship quality AI products that work, by taking the uncertainty and tedium out of incorporating AI into businesses. ## Products & Services - **Braintrust Platform (AI Observability)**: A SaaS platform for tracing, logging, monitoring, and analyzing AI application behavior in production. It captures every trace, tool call, and log, and provides real-time dashboards for latency, cost, and quality. - **Evals (Evaluation Framework)**: A tool for running experiments against real datasets, comparing prompts and models side-by-side, and scoring outputs using LLMs, code, or human review. It helps catch regressions and block bad releases before they hit production. - **Brainstore (AI-Native Database)**: A proprietary database designed specifically for storing and querying complex, nested AI traces at scale. - **Loop Agent**: An AI agent that helps improve AI by automatically generating better prompts, scorers, and datasets based on user-defined optimization goals. - **MCP Server**: Allows coding agents to query logs, run evals, and update prompts directly from an IDE. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metric (Funding)**: **$121.1 million** in total funding. - **Series B (Feb 2026)**: $80M led by ICONIQ Capital. - **Series A (Oct 2024)**: $36M with 12 investors. - **Seed Round (Dec 2023)**: $5.1M led by Greylock. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Greylock, ICONIQ Capital. - **Growth Signals**: - **Headcount growth**: Exploded **+416.1% year-over-year** (from ~7 to 136 employees). - **Customer base**: Used by teams at high-profile companies including Notion, Stripe, Zapier, Vercel, and Ramp. - **Active hiring**: 63 active job postings, with a +215% yearly increase in job postings. - **Global presence**: Operating in 7 countries (US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Austria, South Africa). ## Competitive Advantages - **Unified Workflow**: Connects evals and observability into a single, seamless workflow, bridging the gap between development and production monitoring. - **Purpose-Built Infrastructure**: Developed Brainstore, a database built from the ground up for the unique scale and complexity of AI traces, giving it a performance edge over traditional databases. - **Framework Agnostic**: Works with any stack (Python, TypeScript, Go, Ruby, C#) with no vendor lock-in, making it easy to adopt. - **Enterprise-Grade Security & Compliance**: SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, and HIPAA compliant, with SSO, RBAC, and hybrid deployment options. - **Strong Talent Pool**: Employees are sourced from top-tier tech companies like Grafana Labs, MongoDB, HashiCorp, Figma, and Databricks, indicating a high-caliber team. ## Strategic Focus - **Scaling the Go-To-Market**: With a Series B led by ICONIQ Capital, Braintrust is likely focused on scaling its sales and customer success teams to capture a larger share of the enterprise AI market. - **Product Expansion**: The launch of the Loop Agent and MCP server indicates a focus on automation and developer experience, aiming to reduce manual work for AI teams. - **International Growth**: Expanding its presence in Europe and other key markets. ## Why Work Here - **High Growth Environment**: The company is in a hyper-growth phase (+416% headcount growth), offering significant opportunities for career advancement, ownership, and impact. - **Cutting-Edge Domain**: Working on a critical problem for the AI industry—observability and reliability—which is a high-priority area for many companies. - **Strong Engineering Culture**: The company is heavily technical (36% of staff in technical roles). The leadership includes a founder (Ankur Goyal) and a VP, Field CTO (Ameya Bhatawdekar), suggesting a deep technical focus. - **Culture Highlights**: The company seeks "highly independent, self-motivated, and creative people," suggesting a culture of autonomy and innovation. - **Work Policy**: Roles are listed for San Francisco, New York City, and Remote, indicating a flexible, hybrid-friendly approach. - **Notable Perks**: The company invests heavily in its security and compliance infrastructure (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR), which is a strong signal for employees who value building robust, enterprise-grade systems. ## Sources 1. [braintrust.dev](https://www.braintrust.dev/) 2. [braintrust.dev/careers](https://www.braintrust.dev/careers) 3. [linkedin.com/company/braintrust-data](https://www.linkedin.com/company/braintrust-data) 4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/Braintrust](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Braintrust/) 5. 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