VP, Data Platform & Engineering

Role Description

We are hiring a VP of Data Platform & Engineering to make WISEcode data the easiest and most trustworthy data to consume, inside and out, and to own the machine that ships it safely. This is not merely a pipeline-plumbing role. You will own and develop a portfolio of data products, the engineering motion that ships them, and the trust boundary that protects the corpus from leaking into external AI systems. You set the AI-native engineering standard the rest of the data org builds to.

Your pillar spans:

• Platform: a portfolio of internal data products, delivered as authenticated capabilities and contracts.
• Engineering: the shipment motion that moves a food record from raw input to scored, published output, automated and agentic.
• Data security and governance: the trust boundary, least-privilege access, and the enforcement of our corpus-stewardship doctrine.

As VP of Data Platform & Engineering, you own the substrate under every other data pillar. You will:

• Kill the single-gatekeeper deploy model and replace it with a real deploy regime where production access carries responsibility.
• Define gold-certification by code, so quality is promoted by written criteria, never declared by hand.
• Build and run the platform as a portfolio of data products with clear contracts to the domain teams.
• Own data security and governance: take our key data products to general availability, enforce least privilege, and retire ad-hoc database credentials.
• Stand up observability so we can see what the platform is doing, not guess.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, data platform, or infrastructure, including team leadership.
• A track record of building data products and teams from zero to one.
• Deep command of data contracts, medallion or equivalent quality architecture, and promotion discipline.
• Strong data-security judgment: least privilege, trust boundaries, and access control.
• Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic engineering as a primary way of working.
• Strong SQL and systems-thinking across UI, API, database, and infrastructure boundaries.
• Ability to operate in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup environment.

Requirements

• Experience with MCPs, capability layers, or API-first data access patterns.
• Experience with observability tooling and production diagnostics.
• Experience with Postgres, DuckDB or MotherDuck, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience building internal developer tooling or data-product platforms.

Benefits

• Own the platform and security foundation for one of the most ambitious food intelligence platforms in the world.
• Convert the org's worst bottleneck into its strongest, most defensible capability.
• Work directly with the CDO on the architecture and operation that protects the company's core asset.
• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and rapid impact.
• Solve real problems at the intersection of AI, data, security, and human health.