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Now hiring · Technical leads

Help us connect with consumers and build our first-party data product!

Random Walk has delivered best-in-class alternative data insights on consumer email behavior for over a decade. As we enter an exciting new phase of development, we are seeking proven technical leaders to help design and build a solution to the broken status quo of how brands interact with consumers via email.

By the beach in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California

Open roles

Two hands-on leadership roles

Lead Data Engineer

Machine learning & infrastructureEquityHybridCardiff-by-the-Sea, CA

We are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to serve as the technical owner of the infrastructure and systems powering an exciting new product. The product is focused on improving how Fortune 500 brands market new products and services to customers and leads. This is a hands-on role: you will lead our technical processes and manage a lean development team, directly shaping the systems that help leading institutional asset managers uncover market inflections.

Role & responsibilities

  • Build data pipelines. Design, build and maintain robust, scalable pipelines that process high-volume email text data.
  • Implement LLM systems. Engineer systems that use LLMs for semantic analysis and feature extraction on text data at scale, including API integration, fine-tuning, and optimizing for latency and cost.
  • MLOps & deployment. Own the end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning models. Build, deploy and maintain our primary recommendation and personalization models (e.g., collaborative filtering, gradient boosting, neural networks) in production.
  • Infrastructure ownership. Design and manage the cloud infrastructure for data processing, model training and real-time inference, with high availability and scalability.
  • System integration. Work closely with the backend team to integrate data services and ML models into the core application, with minimal latency for a seamless user experience.
  • Privacy by design. Implement and enforce data handling and modeling practices that fully comply with our privacy-first approach, so every system works only with anonymized, non-PII data.

Qualifications

  • Experience. 5+ years in data or backend engineering, with a proven record of building and deploying data-intensive applications and machine learning systems in production.
  • ML in production. Experience across the full MLOps lifecycle: deploying, monitoring and maintaining models. Personalization and recommendation systems experience is a major plus.
  • LLM applications. Hands-on experience building applications on LLMs via APIs or open-source models. Familiarity with LangChain or Hugging Face is highly desirable.
  • Backend proficiency. Strong backend development skills in Python or Go.
  • Infrastructure & cloud. Deep experience with AWS, GCP or Azure; Docker and Kubernetes; and orchestration tools such as Airflow or Prefect.
  • Education. Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field.
  • Leadership. Strong communication and leadership skills, and a passion for building consumer-centric experiences in an agile environment.
  • Location. Preference for candidates in Southern California.

Senior Backend / Systems Engineer

Distributed systemsEquityHybridCardiff-by-the-Sea, CA

We're looking for a senior backend engineer to help design and operate high-volume, distributed backend systems. The role focuses on data ingestion, asynchronous processing and scalable service design in a production environment with real-world constraints. You'll own critical backend components end to end and make pragmatic decisions about performance, reliability and cost.

Core skills & how you'll use them

  • Backend programming (Go, Python). Build and maintain high-throughput services and background workers.
  • Asynchronous & event-driven systems. Design pipelines with queues and workers that process large volumes of data reliably.
  • Message queues & streaming (Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS, RabbitMQ, Redis, etc.). Handle fan-out processing, retries, backpressure and fault isolation.
  • Third-party API integrations. Build resilient integrations that handle rate limits, partial failures, retries and schema changes.
  • OAuth2 & secure access patterns. Implement token-based access flows and manage long-lived integrations safely.
  • Structured & unstructured data processing. Normalize, parse and extract meaningful data from inconsistent inputs (HTML, text, metadata).
  • Distributed system reliability. Implement idempotency, deduplication, observability and graceful failure handling.
  • Cloud & containerized environments. Deploy and operate services with Docker and cloud infrastructure; Kubernetes experience is a plus.
  • ML inference or classification pipelines. Integrate or operate rules-based, ML-based or hybrid classification workflows in production.
  • Large-scale ingestion systems. Design and operate event-driven, asynchronous pipelines that ingest and process high volumes of data.

Requirements

  • Education. Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field.
  • Experience. At least 5 years working in a team environment deploying technology solutions.
  • Leadership. Strong communication and leadership skills and a passion for building. At least 3 professional references.
  • Location. Must be located in Southern California.

What we offer

Both roles include:

  • Competitive salary and equity
  • Medical, dental & vision insurance
  • Hybrid remote work
  • Commuter benefits
  • Free lunches
  • An office by the beach

How to apply

Send your CV with a brief note of 4–5 sentences describing how your recent experience will help you lead in this role. Put the role title in the subject line.

sales@ranwalk.com
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