Senior Engineer - High Performance Data Systems

About this role

About Encord Encord is the universal data layer for AI. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates and evaluates multimodal data across the full AI lifecycle, from development to production, for 300+ AI teams including Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath and Zipline. Encord was founded by former computer scientists, physicists and quants who saw first-hand how poor tooling for training data slows AI progress. We're a Series C company backed by CRV and Y Combinator, with 150+ people across London, San Francisco and New York.

The role Most engineers never get to redesign core infrastructure for the next 100x of scale. On Foundations, that's the job. AI teams are generating video, images, 3D sensor data and documents faster than anyone's systems can keep up. Help us build the high-performance data systems behind the AI data platform for robotics and beyond. You'll join Foundations, the backend backbone of Encord. We build the reliable, scalable, fast systems every other team and every customer runs on.

The work sits deep in distributed and data-intensive systems: storage, indexing, querying and processing multimodal data at a scale few companies ever reach. The timing is rare. A year ago we were a team of 100; now we're over 150 and still accelerating, driven by massive demand. We are building the team to unlock our next orders of magnitude of scale and capability. What you'll do Own significant projects in our data systems end to end: design, architecture, deployment, monitoring and measuring the impact you made Build distributed systems that stay fast and correct under load, and reason carefully about every way they can fail Shape performant protocols and APIs, that customers build directly on top of Find simple solutions to complex domains at scale, and know when boring technology wins Raise the bar for everyone around you through code reviews, pairing and sharing what you know Why engineers join Foundations Scale that's genuinely hard.

Multimodal AI data is big, messy and growing fast. You'll solve problems most backend engineers only read about. Real ownership. You'll own whole systems, not tickets, and the architectural calls are yours to make. Work that ships. Your systems power 300+ AI teams, including Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath and Zipline. Long-term thinking. A team that plans 24 months out and gives you room to build things properly. The right moment.