What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer position at Syndril?
Data Infrastructure Engineer | Early Stage | Equity Cash
About the Role:
We're an early stage venture building an ontology driven context engine: infrastructure that materializes connected data (objects, properties, relationships) and serves it to applications and AI systems at high speed. The architecture is defined and a working concept prototype exists. We're now building the real thing from the ground up with the right foundation together. This is a solo founder venture, you would be the first technical hire.
Must be comfortable going back and forth on the nuances of CHOOSING the tech stack and the complexities that come with delivering on a brand new project. Must have a strong temperament ; if you're applying, it's assumed you thrive in ambiguity, can hold your own in technical debate, and don't need everything handed to you before you start moving
This role owns the data path up to and including the serve layer: ingestion, ontology materialization, identity matching, the cold (object storage) and warm (on-disk cache) tiers, versioning, and reliability. In short, everything that turns raw source data into correct, fresh, serve-ready artifacts that never silently go stale.
The GPU/compute layer is handled separately and is out of scope for this role.
What You'll Work On
- Hardening the cold-to-warm materialization pipeline
- Designing versioning and a "never serve stale data" guarantee into the core
- Identity-matching correctness and consistency as data refreshes over time
- Concurrency, race conditions, and reliability under real load
Who This Is For
Someone who has done real data-infrastructure or distributed-systems work and can not only build it, but stand behind its correctness. You find the failure modes, design the guarantees, and prove they hold.
You enjoy going deep in the weeds. You stress-test your own work, poke holes in it, and don't move on until it holds up. You understand lower-level systems and frameworks, not just the abstractions on top of them.
You understand what ontology and knowledge graphs actually mean, and why serving structured, connected context to AI and data systems matters. You see the bigger picture of what this infrastructure unlocks.
You believe Western civilization and the United States should have superior technology, and that belief drives how seriously you take the work.
Our Goal With This Hire
We're looking for someone to build with long-term. The goal is to reach an MVP and a paid pilot with real companies together. If this turns into a long-term fit, that conversation will happen naturally; if it doesn't, no hard feelings. But we'd rather find someone who wants to be here for the whole ride.
On Education
A university degree is not required and should not deter you from applying. What matters is merit. If you don't have a degree, simply show us the industry experience and work that replaces it. We evaluate people on what they've built and how they think, not where they went to school.
Compensation — Please Read Carefully Before Applying
This is a brand-new venture with zero current cash flow. Cash compensation is real but modest — we're talking sub-$25/hr — and is not the point of this role.
Do not apply if you're expecting to make serious money in the near term. You won't, and we'd be wasting each other's time.
We're offering meaningful equity to the right person. The biggest compensation here is potential future payoff, not what we can pay today.
This is for someone who believes in the vision, wants real ownership in something early, and is betting on the upside — not someone optimizing for hourly rate.
If that framing excites you rather than deters you, you're probably the kind of person we want to talk to.
To Apply
Tell us briefly:
- A data-infrastructure or storage system you've built or hardened
- How you'd approach guaranteeing a serve layer never returns stale data during a rebuild
Pay: $15.00 per hour
Application Question(s):
- MUST BE GREENCARD HOLDER AT A MINIMUM ( NO SPONSERSHIP AT THIS TIME)
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Dallas, TX 75205
Salary : $15 - $25