Tzafon is a research firm building scalable compute systems and advancing machine intelligence, with offices in San Francisco & Tel Aviv. We recently raised $9.7m in pre-seed funding to advance our mission of expanding the frontiers of machine intelligence.

We’re a team of engineers and scientists with deep backgrounds in ML infrastructure & research. Founded by IOI and IMO medalists, PhDs, and alumni from leading tech companies, we train models and build infrastructure for swarms of agents to automate work across real-world environments.

This role will work closely with our researchers on collecting and preparing data for the training of our foundation models. You'll be developing the data engine that powers our models, ensuring it is clean, diverse, and high-quality.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain scalable data pipelines for training and fine-tuning LLMs and agent models
• Create and optimize distributed computing systems for processing web-scale datasets
• Clean, deduplicate, normalize, and cluster diverse datasets across structured and unstructured sources
• Design robust pipelines using tools like Spark, BigQuery, DBT, and Airflow
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to develop reproducible dataset curation workflows
• Monitor data quality and build tools for versioning, observability, and auditing
• Help define what “great data” looks like for real-world intelligent agents
• Develop and maintain core processing primitives (e.g., tokenization, deduplication, chunking) with a focus on scalability

We’re looking for

• Have 3+ years of full-time experience as a data engineer and 6+ years of any software engineering experience (including data engineering).
• Proficiency in Python, Scala, or Java
• Solid understanding of Spark and ability to write, debug and optimize Spark code
• Familiarity with GCP, BigQuery, DBT, Trino, Hex, and other cloud-based data and analytics platforms
• Experience with ML datasets and data preparation for model training
• Excited about joining a fast-moving research team to shape the quality of intelligence from the ground up

Sample Projects

• Designing and implementing distributed computing architecture for web-scale data processing
• Building scalable infrastructure for model training data preparation
• Creating comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems
• Optimizing tokenization infrastructure for improved throughput
• Developing fault-tolerant distributed processing systems
• Implementing new infrastructure components based on research requirements
• Building automated testing frameworks for distributed systems

Life at Tzafon

• Full medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus 401(k)
• Office in SF and Tel Aviv
• Early-stage equity in a future-defining company

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

Compensation

Compensation starts at $150k-$425k and equity package.

We also offer a referral bonus of $20k for referral of successful hires (send to careers@tzafon.ai).