Data Engineer

Data Engineers: Let 250+ Companies Compete For You

Fonzi is an AI recruiting company.

No job boards. No recruiter spam. Companies request to interview you and submit salary bids upfront.

Every week, hiring managers at 250+ pre-vetted startups in NYC and San Francisco review a curated group of engineers. They're reading profiles optimized by our team to surface what matters: what you've built, how you think about systems, and whether you're the kind of engineer who ships.

Companies on Fonzi are Applied AI startups, Frontier labs, Hypergrowth startups, PE firms starting lean AI teams and more. They're backed by investors like A16z, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator and more.

How It Works

• 5-minute application
• We reach out, learn what you're building and what excites you, and optimize your profile
• Hiring managers review the cohort and request interviews with candidates they want
• Companies submit competing salary bids directly to you
• You only interview where you're genuinely interested
• Completely free. We have an iMessage agent + humans in the loop you can text anytime w/ questions or requests to help handle scheduling and coordination

Who We're Looking For

The data engineers who do best on Fonzi:

• Have built and owned production data pipelines, from ingestion to warehouse to the teams and models that use them
• Are strong in Python and SQL, and experienced with tools like Spark, dbt, Airflow, Kafka, Snowflake or BigQuery
• Think about data quality, lineage and cost, not just getting the job to run
• Have built data foundations for AI (training data, embeddings, retrieval, eval datasets) or want to
• Thrive in startup environments where the problem is ambiguous and the team is small
• Have 2-8 years of experience, ideally with experience at at least one high-growth company

What You'll Build

The companies on Fonzi are working on:

• Data pipelines that feed AI models and agents with clean, reliable data
• Retrieval and embedding infrastructure behind production RAG systems
• Training and eval datasets that make models measurably better
• Real-time and streaming data systems for fintech, healthcare and logistics
• Warehouses and analytics foundations that scale from first customer to enterprise

Compensation

• $170,000 to $290,000+ base salary depending on experience and role. Many positions include meaningful equity at pre-seed through Series B stage companies.

The Interview Process (Typical)

• Screening conversation looking for communication skills, cultural fit and genuine curiosity about AI
• Technical deep-dive on data architecture: pipelines, modeling and scale
• Coding or pairing session on SQL, Python or a realistic pipeline problem

If you know that great AI starts with great data and you want to build that foundation, we want to hear from you.