---
title: 'Staff Data Platform Engineer at Reality Defender'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-data-platform-engineer-reality-defender-new-york-nvz2cf9yh1gz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-29'
---

# Staff Data Platform Engineer at Reality Defender

- **Company:** Reality Defender
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $210k–$260k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-10-16
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-29
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/realitydefender/929e2408-f5aa-4944-b27c-7ccb8ee07237

## Job description

Staff Data Platform Engineer Location: NYC HQ or Remote (U.S.)| Full-time | Engineering Who we are. Reality Defender is an award-winning cybersecurity company helping enterprises and governments detect deepfakes and AI-generated media. Utilizing a patented multi-model approach, Reality Defender is robust against the bleeding edge of generative platforms producing video, audio, imagery, and text media. Reality Defender's API-first deepfake detection platform empowers teams and developers alike to identify fraud, disinformation campaigns, and harmful deepfakes in real time. Backed by world class investors including DCVC, Illuminate Financial, Y Combinator, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Accenture, Rackhouse, and Argon VC, Reality Defender works with leading enterprise clients, financial institutions, and governments in order to ensure AI-generated media is not used for malicious purposes. Youtube: Reality Defender Wins RSA Most Innovative Startup The Staff Data Platform Engineer Role. Reality Defender's detection models are only as strong as the data behind them, and every new generative tool raises the bar on the volume and variety of media we need to train and evaluate against. The Staff Data Platform Engineer will own the shared AI data platform behind our vision, audio, and multimodal research, turning acquired and internally generated image, video, audio, and text data into reliable, reproducible datasets, from continuous ingestion through processing, governance, and export. This is a senior, hands-on role where you'll complete our Databricks and distributed processing platform and build the reusable infrastructure behind our in-house synthetic data generation, including producing the very deepfakes our models learn to catch. This is a full-time role, reporting to our Director of Data. Responsibilities include:

- Own the end-to-end data platform for AI research: continuous ingestion, preprocessing, governance, and export of image, video, audio, and text data at high volume.
- Complete and scale our Databricks lakehouse and distributed processing stack (Spark, Ray, or similar), making architecture and build-vs-buy decisions that hold up as data volume grows.
- Build reusable infrastructure for in-house synthetic data generation, so researchers can produce new deepfake variants across modalities on demand instead of one-off.
- Make every dataset reproducible and traceable through versioning, lineage, metadata, quality checks, and stable train/eval splits, so any model result can be tied back to the exact data behind it.
- Own pipeline reliability, observability, and processing cost per dataset as core metrics of the platform.
- Partner with ML researchers to understand their data needs and turn them into self-serve tools that speed up model iteration.
- Mentor engineers and raise the bar on data engineering practices: code review, testing, documentation, and runbooks.
- Work with Security and compliance stakeholders to make sure data handling, licensing, and access controls meet the standards our enterprise and government clients expect.
- Help shape the long-term data platform roadmap with engineering and research leadership.

Who you are.

- 8+ years building data platforms or data infrastructure, including staff- or lead-level ownership of production pipelines that generate, ingest, or deliver data at high volume.
- Deep hands-on experience with distributed processing (Spark, Ray, or similar) and lakehouse platforms, ideally Databricks, on top of cloud object storage (S3, GCS, or Azure Blob).
- Production experience with Databricks, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and Spark on AWS, including performance tuning, access controls, and operational troubleshooting.
- Experience working with large unstructured media such as video, audio, or images, including the realities of large files, decoding and transcoding, and metadata at scale.
- A track record of building reproducible ML datasets: versioning, lineage, data quality validation, and orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Databricks Workflows, or similar).
- Strong Python and SQL, and the judgment to own ambiguous platform problems end-to-end on a lean team.
- Own infrastructure and deployment automation using Terraform and CI/CD, including AWS storage, IAM, compute, Databricks resources, and distributed processing environments.
- Experience building synthetic data generation pipelines or running generative models (diffusion, voice cloning/TTS, video generation) at scale. (nice to have)
- Background supporting ML research teams with training and evaluation data, especially for multimodal models. (nice to have)
- Experience in security, fraud, trust & safety, or another adversarial domain, or at a Series A or B startup where scope regularly outpaces headcount. (nice to have)

Within 12 months, you'll…

- Own a mature, self-serve data platform that researchers use to create, version, and export datasets without waiting on platform support.
- Have scaled synthetic data generation across vision, audio, and multimodal research, broadening our detection coverage of new generative techniques.
- Deliver reproducible evaluation datasets that let the company compare model versions with confidence.
- Be setting the multi-year data platform roadmap and leading high-leverage initiatives beyond the original scope.

What we offer. Reality Defender offers the following benefits to all our employees, regardless of location:

- Healthcare plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and partial coverage available for dependents
- Dental and Vision plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and their dependents
- Short/Long-term disability and life insurance plans with 100% premium coverage for employees
- FSA/HSA and 401k programs
- Equity compensation
- 20 days of PTO per year
- 12 weeks of Parental Leave
- Learning and Development budget
- Monthly wellness benefits
- Annual company-sponsored offsite

For employees working from Reality Defender's HQ in NYC, we offer the following benefits:

- Daily in-office lunch through UberEats
- Commuter benefits
- Remote Fridays
- Happy Hours and other local events

Base salary range: 210,000 - 260,000, based on experience, level, and location. Role includes equity.

## About Reality Defender

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Reality Defender is a deepfake detection platform that protects enterprises and governments from real-time AI-generated media fraud across voice, video, image, and text.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Ben Colman (CEO), Gaurav Bharaj, Ali Shahriyari

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Computer and Network Security / Deepfake Detection
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises, financial institutions, government agencies, and critical infrastructure operators
- **Mission**: Become the de facto AI detection standard for large organizations, ensuring trust in an AI-enabled world by providing real-time detection of synthetic media.

## Products & Services
- **Reality Defender API & SDKs**: Award-winning AI models for detecting deepfakes and AI-manipulated media across audio, video, and images. Free tier available for developers.
- **Contact Center Security**: Real-time detection of deepfake impersonations during calls to prevent fraud.
- **Secure Video Conferencing**: Protects video meetings from synthetic media injection and impersonation.
- **Access Security & Fraud Prevention**: Identity verification and user authentication with deepfake detection.
- **Brand & Executive Protection**: Monitors and detects impersonation of executives and brands across channels.
- **Government Solutions**: Tailored detection layers for high-risk environments, including defense and intelligence.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (total funding $48.6M)
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue $4.5M (estimated); total funding $48.6M across 9 rounds (Series A $33M led by Illuminate Financial, Oct 2024)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Illuminate Financial (lead Series A), Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs, SXSW (grant), JPMorgan (Hall of Innovation), World Economic Forum (Technology Pioneer), USA DIU + Japan MOD (Global Innovation Challenge winner)
- **Growth Signals**: 63 employees (+26.9% YoY); recognized as market leader by Gartner (2025); won RSA Conference “Most Innovative Startup” (2024); inducted into JPMorgan Hall of Innovation (2025); operates in 8 countries.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Ensemble detection engine**: Uses hundreds of simultaneous, platform-agnostic techniques to detect the widest array of synthetic content.
- **Multi-modal coverage**: Real-time detection across voice, video, image, and text.
- **Enterprise-grade scale**: Deploy-anywhere solutions integrated into existing workflows (calls, meetings, identity systems).
- **Bleeding edge resilience**: Models are continuously blended, tested, and updated to anticipate new generative AI threats.
- **Strong partnerships and trust**: Advisory council includes former CIA, Google Privacy Officer, and military leaders; clients include financial institutions and government agencies.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling enterprise adoption, expanding into new verticals (finance, government), deepening real-time detection capabilities, and building the “Enterprise Authenticity Layer” for critical communications.
- **Growth direction**: Becoming the standard for deepfake detection in large organizations, investing in research (publications on audio and video detection), and growing the team (10 open positions as of mid-2026).

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven**: Work on cutting-edge AI security that directly protects people, institutions, and democratic trust.
- **Culture**: Values of integrity, continuous innovation, cross-functionality, impact, and inclusion. Emphasizes transparency and rigorous testing.
- **Work environment**: Collaborative in-office environment in historic Tribeca, New York City. Team of builders, researchers, and realists.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health and wellness benefits, generous employee perks, and investment in professional growth.
- **Engineering culture**: Bleeding-edge AI research, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and opportunities to publish and contribute to the field.

## Sources
1. [realitydefender.com/company](https://www.realitydefender.com/company)
2. [realitydefender.com/](https://www.realitydefender.com/)
3. [realitydefender.com/careers](https://www.realitydefender.com/careers)
4. [linkedin.com/company/reality-defender](https://www.linkedin.com/company/reality-defender)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/realitydefender](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/realitydefender)

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