Engineering Manager, Data

Department: Research

Location: *HQ - San Francisco, CA

Compensation: $250K – $375K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Cartesia

Our mission is to architect AI that learns from and interacts with the world like humans do.

We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where we invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences.

We're funded by leading investors at Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90+ angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI.

About the Role

At Cartesia, the quality of our models is inseparable from the quality of our data. As we push the frontier of real-time multimodal AI, we're looking for a leader to own the systems, datasets, and research that make our training data exceptional.

You'll lead our Data team, responsible for three tightly connected areas:

• Data infrastructure — web-scale processing and storage that keeps petabytes of multimodal data flowing reliably to the teams that depend on it.

• State-of-the-art pre-training datasets — building the multimodal annotation models that understand who said what, when, and how, and curating the data mixes that shape model behavior.

• Data-centric modeling — training and evaluating models to understand what actually makes data good, and turning those insights into better datasets.

You'll start by managing a team of 6–8 spanning core data infrastructure and individual modeling efforts, and grow it toward ~12 as our ambitions scale. This is a role for someone who has done this before: built and led a data team, shipped data at the scale modern models demand, and knows the difference between infrastructure that works in a demo and infrastructure that works at web scale.

Your Impact

• Lead and grow a high-caliber team of data infrastructure engineers and data-focused researchers, splitting focus between shared infra and dedicated modeling teams.

• Set the technical direction for how Cartesia processes, stores, and serves multimodal data at web scale.

• Drive the creation of SOTA multimodal pre-training datasets — including the annotation models and curation strategies that determine what our models learn.

• Establish a rigorous, empirical approach to data quality: training and evaluating models specifically to understand what makes data valuable, and feeding that back into dataset decisions.

• Partner closely with our modeling and research teams to make sure data work translates directly into better models.

• Hire, mentor, and develop engineers and researchers as the team scales from a handful of people to a full organization.

What You Bring

• Proven management experience, including directly leading a data team of at least 6 people.

• Hands-on familiarity with data infrastructure at scale — processing, storage, and the systems that make large-scale data usable.

• A track record of building and leading data efforts, ideally in the context of a modeling project.

Nice-To-Haves

• Previous modeling experience

• Experience building data for a generative modeling organization.

• Familiarity with multimodal data (audio, speech, and beyond).

Note: Cartesia participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with Form I-9 information to confirm employment eligibility after hire.

More Details

🏢 In-office policy: We’re an in-person team based out of offices in 🇺🇸 San Francisco, 🇬🇧 London and 🇮🇳 Bangalore. We love being in the office, hanging out together, and learning from each other every day.

🌎 Visa sponsorship: We provide visa sponsorship support and assess each circumstance on a case-by-case basis. However, visa sponsorship is dependent on many factors, including the role you are applying for, and the location you are going to be based, and so we can't always guarantee success. Your Recruiter will work with you to understand your visa sponsorship needs from the first call.

🚢 We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don’t sacrifice quality or design along the way.

🤝 We support each other. We have an open & inclusive culture that’s focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed.

Our Benefits (US Employees Only)

💰 Compensation Competitive base salary alongside attractive equity package.

🩺 Health Insurance Fully covered medical insurance along with dental and vision for you and your family.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Parental Leave 9 weeks paternity & 12 weeks maternity leave

🏦 401(k)

🚆 Commuter Allowance A monthly stipend to help you get to and from the office.

🏖️ Flexible PTO Take as much time as you need to recharge your batteries.

🍲 Meals & Snacks Lunch, dinner and plenty of snacks, provided daily.

🦖 Your own personal Yoshi

Our Commitment to Equal Opportunity

Cartesia is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status.