What the role involves
About Artisan
We're building AI employees. Not chatbots. Not copilots. Autonomous digital workers that do real jobs.
Our first, Ava, is an AI BDR used by hundreds of companies. She researches leads, writes and sends emails in a customer's voice, runs multi-step outbound sequences, manages her own deliverability infrastructure, self-optimizes over time, and handles objections and meeting booking. She's not a tool someone uses. She's a teammate.
We're a YC W24 company, have raised $35M+ from investors including Y Combinator, and are at $9M+ ARR. We just launched Ava 2.0, a step change in what an AI employee can do. The engineering problems are hard and the surface area is enormous.
Role overview
You'll be the first Data Engineer on the Artisan team! We're managing a database of hundreds of millions of leads and creating real-time intent signals which monitor data fields for those leads. You'll own everything data-related at Artisan.
Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines that process and transform large volumes of structured and unstructured data
Manage ingestion from third-party APIs, internal systems, and customer datasets
Develop and maintain data models, data schemas, and storage systems optimized for ML and product performance
Collaborate with ML engineers to prepare model-ready datasets, embeddings, feature stores, and evaluation data
Implement data quality monitoring, validation, and observability
Work closely with product engineers to support new features that rely on complex data flows
Optimize systems for performance, cost, and reliability
Contribute to early architecture decisions, infrastructure design, and best practices for data governance
Build tooling that enables the entire team to access clean, well-structured data
Location
- San Francisco, New York, or Remote USA
- Team: Engineering
- Reports to: CPTO, Sam Stallings
- Who you are
- 3+ years of experience as a Data Engineer
- Proficiency in Python, SQL, and modern data tooling (dbt, Airflow, Dagster, or similar)
- Comfort working in fast, ambiguous environments
- Experience designing and operating ETL/ELT pipelines in production
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Familiarity with data lakes, warehouses, and vector databases
- Experience integrating APIs and working with semi-structured data (JSON, logs, event streams)
- Strong understanding of data modeling and optimization
Bonus
experience supporting LLMs, embeddings, or ML training pipelines
Bonus
startup experience
Interview process
- Introductory chat with our recruiter
- 1 hour technical interview with an engineer
- 1 hour technical interview with an engineer
- 30-minute interview with Sam, our CPTO
- 15-minute culture and values interview with Jaspar, our CEO
Our culture and values
- Founder mindset. Everyone acts like an owner: take initiative, think big, challenge ideas, and push for 10× outcomes
- Obsessed with impact. We apply the 80/20 rule, kill sunk costs quickly, and focus on what actually moves the needle
- Customer-first, always. Every decision is made with the customer experience at the center
- High standards, every detail. Quality matters in everything we ship, from product and code to copy and design
- Clear, direct communication. We value candor, fast responses, and feedback
- Winning team energy. We bring positive vibes, low ego, zero drama, and genuinely enjoy building together
About Artisan
At Artisan, we’re building real AI employees - not copilots, not assistants, but autonomous teammates. Our first, Ava, is an AI BDR. She finds and researches leads, writes emails in customers’ tone of voice, runs outbound sequences, self-optimizes, and manages email deliverability infrastructure. She learns, adapts, and improves over time - just like a human would. Human team members use Artisan as their primary working platform, replacing a sprawling stack of sales tools, and have Artisans working alongside them. We went through Y Combinator (W24) and have raised $35M+ from top investors. We’re at $6M+ ARR, with hundreds of customers including Remote, Quora, and SumUp. We’re currently working on Ava 2.0, pushing the boundaries of what an AI employee can do. And we're hiring.
Full Artisan profile