Data Lead, Research

Cartesia

Cartesia

San Francisco, CA, USA
USD 180k-250k / year + Equity
Posted on Sep 16, 2025

Location

HQ - San Francisco, CA

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Staff

Compensation

  • $180K – $250K • Offers Equity

About Cartesia

Our mission is to build the next generation of AI: ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that runs wherever you are. Today, not even the best models can continuously process and reason over a year-long stream of audio, video and text—1B text tokens, 10B audio tokens and 1T video tokens—let alone do this on-device.

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.

The Role

Data is the lifeblood of our models, and we are looking for a Data Lead to own the strategy and execution for all data at Cartesia. This is a critical leadership role, where you will be responsible for building and managing the datasets that power our cutting-edge research. You will lead a talented team of data engineers and specialists to acquire, process, and curate massive multimodal datasets. Your vision will directly shape the capabilities and quality of our foundational models.

What you’ll do

  • Define Cartesia’s overall multi-modal data strategy across pre-training and post-training, including human, synthetic, and web-scale data sources.

  • Lead, manage, and mentor a team.

  • Design and oversee the construction of robust, scalable data pipelines for text, audio, and video.

  • Establish and enforce rigorous standards for data quality across the organization.

  • Deeply understand how data affects model capability and proactively identify and source novel datasets.

  • Manage relationships and budgets with external data vendors and partners.

What we’re looking for

  • Technical expertise in large-scale data engineering.

  • Familiarity with building datasets for and evaluating generative models.

  • Leadership skills to grow and guide a high-impact data team.

Our culture

🏢 We’re an in-person team based out of San Francisco. We love being in the office, hanging out together and learning from each other everyday.

🚢 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 and design along the way.

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

Our perks

🍽 Lunch, dinner and snacks at the office.

🏥 Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees.

🏦 401(k).

✈️ Relocation and immigration support.

🦖 Your own personal Yoshi.

Compensation Range: $180K - $250K