Lead Product Engineer, Data & AI Platform

Job Description

ABOUT SWEETWATER

Sweetwater is a private equity firm investing in growth- and later-stage private companies. We primarily invest through direct secondaries transactions. A “direct secondary” investment means we typically purchase shares in a single company from prior investors, executives, and employees. A portion of capital is available for primary equity investments as well. We invest across technology, healthcare, financials, business services, light-industrial, and consumer companies. Our typical investment size is $20M–$30M per company and Sweetwater will lead much larger transactions with our co-investment partners.

Our strategy is to invest in exceptional companies by finding sellers who want or need liquidity ahead of a more traditional exit event. It is a relationship-driven, trust-based strategy we have been building for a decade. Our strategy benefits significantly from surfacing performance and liquidity signals through hard-to-find data that help direct and focus our relationship-building efforts.

THE ROLE

As our Lead Product Engineer, you will be Sweetwater’s first full-time engineer and the owner of our data and AI platform. The role is roughly 50% building, 20% product and innovation (listening, inventing, deciding what gets built and why), 20% maintenance, 10% security and compliance. You will report to the Head of Research and Origination and work daily with the business development and investment teams.

This is not a spec-writing role. You will be expected to scope, write, and ship production code, own its uptime, and decide what not to build. Requests will arrive from both business development and investment team professionals, as well as the platform’s own data. You should be creative, spot needs the team has not yet identified and come up with ideas and solutions to advance the firm’s objectives on your own. You will turn those ideas into a ranked roadmap, defend that ranking, and deliver it.

We run on frontier AI tools, agentic coding tools, and LLM enrichment agents. You already build this way and multiply a one-person team’s output with agents rather than headcount. You also understand that an SEC registered investment adviser holds confidential company data and material non-public information and is required to follow SEC regulations relative to cyber security and the confidentiality of company data, and you can design and build systems accordingly.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Note: We will discuss this in depth during the interview process – we are limiting the information below so as not to publish proprietary technology, specific vendors used, and roadmap on the open web.

Build and maintain

• Own the data platform codebase: ingestion, entity resolution across vendors, scoring, enrichment agents, and the web interface.
• Build new capability: company, fund and GP portfolio mapping, signals ideation and thesis discovery, relationship mapping across the firm’s networks, and outreach workflows.
• Run production: hosting, monitoring, cost control on LLM and cloud spend, backups, and incident response.
• Write tests, documentation, and agent instructions so the system remains observable and maintainable by one person plus AI tools.

Product

• Collect requests from the partners, the investment team, and the business development team, and from usage data.
• Maintain a single ranked roadmap with explicit reasoning for each priority, and tactfully say no to requests that do not earn a place.
• Translate loosely stated investment ideas – e.g. “flag any 2017 fund that invested in [x company] in 2021 and who the most likely motivated sellers would be” – into data models, signals, and interfaces.
• Measure whether shipped features change behavior: meetings booked, signals acted on, deals sourced, and investment dollars deployed.

Data operations and integrations

• Own API connections among internal tooling such as our CRM, the data platform, Notion, Slack, Box, Claude, and other data vendors.
• Make strategic decisions about which products serve as systems of record vs signal processors.
• Manage data vendors: coverage audits, renewals input, and evaluation of sources.
• Plan the longer-term data layer for time-series and document data that a CRM cannot hold.
• Maintain a strong security posture across every integration, operating within the firm’s written cybersecurity, privacy, and recordkeeping policies as an SEC-registered investment adviser.

REQUIREMENTS

• Experience owning systems end-to-end, from ideation through to real usage/users.
• Six or more years building and running production software.
• Strong Python and SQL; experience with a modern web framework, relational databases, and a major cloud platform.
• Shipped LLM-based systems in production: agents, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, and the cost and reliability work that follows.
• Daily, fluent use of AI coding agents, with the judgment to review and own what they produce.
• Integration experience across SaaS APIs (CRM, collaboration, storage), including authentication, rate limits, sync conflicts, and failure handling.
• A record of making product calls: choosing what to build, cutting scope, and explaining trade-offs to people who are not technical or have not built software.
• Security instincts that show up in design: least-privilege access, secrets management, audit trails, and knowing which data must never leave a controlled environment.
• Comfort working directly with partners and investors: concise, unflustered, and able to discuss technology needs, product needs, and business needs fluently.
• The ability to quickly learn and apply SEC rules that govern an investment adviser’s technology stack.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience in private equity, venture capital, or a fintech or data product serving investors.
• Working knowledge of investment fund structures, nomenclature, and metrics: vintage, DPI, TVPI, fund life, and primaries vs. secondaries.
• An investment CRM (e.g., Salesforce, Affinity, DealCloud), including its API.
• Entity resolution, graph, or many-to-many relationship modeling (companies, funds, management companies, and people).
• Data warehousing (Snowflake, BigQuery, or Postgres at scale) and document ingestion pipelines.
• Founder or first-engineer experience at an early-stage company.

SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

Sweetwater is an SEC-registered investment adviser, and our data includes confidential company financials received under NDA, fund reporting, and potentially material non-public information. SEC rules and examination expectations for cybersecurity, data protection, and recordkeeping apply directly to the systems you will build and run. Understanding and following them is part of the job, not a separate function. You will be expected to:

• Treat data classification as a design input: what each system may hold, which AI vendors may process it, and under what terms.
• Understand and follow the SEC cybersecurity and privacy requirements that apply to investment advisers.
• Work within the firm’s written cybersecurity policies, incident response program, and periodic risk assessments while documenting controls well enough that they can be evidenced to SEC examiners.
• Work with our Chief Compliance Officer and outside counsel on information barriers, access controls, recordkeeping, and vendor oversight.
• Build automation that respects third-party terms of service, and raise the issue early when a requested approach does not.

COMPENSATION, LOCATION, AND HOW TO APPLY

• Base salary: $225k - $275k, plus annual discretionary bonus between 25% and 50% of your base salary. Potential fund economic consideration (i.e. “Carry”) after two years of excellent performance. Benefits include medical/dental/vision, 401(k), PTO. Applications accepted through November 6, 2026.
• Location: Remote ok in Pacific or Mountain time zone locations. If not in office (San Diego or San Francisco, CA), we will require occasional travel to San Francisco and/or San Diego on a semi-regular basis (three – four days every 4 – 6 weeks) for collaboration purposes.
• Start: No later than January 2027.

Our interview process includes a paid take-home exercise on a real (anonymized) platform problem and a working session with the business development team and a partner.

Sweetwater is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.