Founding Engineer, Data Infrastructure
Runtime Labs builds Óra at ora.app.
As a Founding Engineer focused on Data Infrastructure, you will own the systems that turn fragmented external sources into reliable event state: collecting raw observations, extracting and normalizing events, resolving duplicates and revisions, preserving provenance, and serving canonical time-indexed data to Óra. This role sits between infrastructure, data systems, and product integrations.
About the Role
- Own Óra’s event data system across acquisition, canonicalization, provenance, freshness, storage, serving, and recovery
- Define Óra’s canonical event data model and the contracts between source observations, normalized events, and product-visible state
- Collect raw observations from web sources, APIs, calendars, and custom integrations; extract and normalize them into structured, time-indexed events
- Resolve duplicates, revisions, and conflicts so Óra serves a coherent canonical event state
- Preserve provenance from source observation through normalized event to product-visible state
- Design storage and serving paths—including S3-backed corpora, Postgres-backed indexes, and efficient read APIs—for product and model-grounded workflows
- Build freshness, backfill, retry, and recovery paths so event state remains trustworthy when sources change or pipelines fail
- Work across Next.js and strong backend services to ship ingestion, tooling, and operator surfaces that keep the event data system healthy
- Partner with Product and Infrastructure so data-layer contracts improve planning quality, sync, and contextual memory
About the Person
- Infrastructure and systems engineer who wants ownership of a product-critical event data system, not just pipelines
- Experience building or operating acquisition systems—web scraping, crawlers, or large-scale ingestion—and turning messy sources into reliable structured state
- Comfortable defining schemas and contracts that evolve as product needs change
- Strong backend skills; productive in modern TypeScript/Node environments and familiar with Next.js where product and ops tooling meet the data layer
- Experience with tools such as Playwright/Crawlee, S3, Postgres, SQS, Temporal, or equivalent systems
- Cares about correctness, freshness, provenance, and recovery—not just moving bytes
- Excited by calendars, timelines, structured memory, and turning fragmented real-world sources into durable product primitives
- Wants high ownership as an early long-term partner building a new product category
Experience
- Prior work on marketplace, local, calendar, maps, or other event-heavy consumer data domains
- Familiarity with rate limiting, proxying, robots/ToS-aware scraping, and respectful source access
- Experience building internal tools for dataset inspection, lineage, or pipeline monitoring
- Interest in model-grounded workflows that consume structured event context
Location & Compensation
Location: San Francisco. We are building the founding team in person and expect to work closely together during the company's early formation.
Salary: $150k–$200k depending on experience and role.
Equity: meaningful early-stage ownership for long-term partners.
Exceptional candidates may be considered outside this range.
We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every qualification.