Posted 5 months ago

Tech Lead (CI & Test Data Platform)

San FranciscoRemoteFull-time

AI Summary

Tech Lead who designs and builds data pipelines, storage systems, and backend services powering flaky test detection and CI analytics; leads a small team through complex distributed systems and collaborates with customers to translate pain points into robust solutions.

About this role

At Trunk, our mission is to help teams create high-quality software quickly. We've helped engineerings teams at: Google X, Zillow, and Brex to understand why their builds fail, which tests are flaky, and how to ship code faster without sacrificing reliability. AI has made writing code 10x faster, but shipping is still painfully slow. The bottleneck has shifted downstream - to merge conflicts, flaky tests, inconsistent code quality, and dozens of other frictions that drain productivity and morale. Engineering teams that can stay focused on designing, implementing, and delivering software will build magical, high-quality projects - and they'll be happier doing it. We're building a CI Reliability Platform that empowers teams to land code faster and develop happier.

Our founders launched Trunk in 2021 after designing, delivering, and scaling software at Uber, Google, YouTube, and Microsoft. We raised a $25M Series A led by Initialized Capital (Garry Tan) and a16z (Peter Levine), with investments from Haystack Ventures, Garage VC, and the founders of GitHub (Tom Preston-Werner), Apollo GraphQL (Geoff Schmidt), Algolia (Nicolas Dessaigne), and Peopl.ai (Oleg Rogynsky).

CI pipelines are black boxes. Engineers waste hours debugging failures that turn out to be flaky tests or infrastructure noise. Trunk makes this visible: what failed, why, and whether it's worth fixing.

The next wave is agentic. AI tools today hit a wall when code leaves the local environment. We're building the data layer that lets AI agents actually reason about CI: diagnosing failures, suggesting fixes, and eventually shipping code autonomously.

We're looking for a Tech Lead to own the data platform that powers Trunk's flaky test detection and CI analytics products. You'll design and build the systems that ingest millions of test runs per hour, surface actionable insights, and lay the foundation for AI-driven CI workflows.

We're at an inflection point. The scale challenges are real and growing. The AI/agentic future of development tooling is taking shape, and we're building the data infrastructure that makes it possible. If you want to work on hard systems problems with direct customer impact, this is the role.

What you'll do 🧑‍💻

Design and build the data pipelines, storage systems, and backend services that power Trunk's flaky test and CI products

Lead a team of engineers through complex distributed systems and data infrastructure challenges

Work directly with customers to understand their pain points and translate them into robust technical solutions

Drive architectural decisions for scale, reliability, and future AI/agentic integrations (MCP, semantic failure clustering, automated remediation)

Ship independently with high autonomy. We're a small team solving hard problems, and you'll have significant ownership

We're looking for 🔎

7+ years of backend/infrastructure engineering experience, with a focus on data processing pipelines and distributed systems

Experience leading teams of 2+ engineers on complex technical projects

Track record of building and operating systems at scale

Strong proficiency in Rust and Python; familiarity with TypeScript

Experience with our stack: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, AWS, Kubernetes, Dagster

Comfort with monitoring, observability, and debugging in distributed environments

Previous experience at a high-growth startup

You're a good fit if ℹ️

You're passionate about building high-quality, scalable systems and take pride in clean, maintainable code

You have deep experience with distributed systems, databases, and performance optimization

You're comfortable navigating large codebases and can ramp quickly on complex systems

You enjoy mentoring engineers and thrive in collaborative environments

Experience and intuition to zero in on root causes for bugs that can leave others stumped

You're self-directed, making sound technical decisions without waiting for detailed specs

Our tech stack 💻

Frontend: Typescript, React, Next.js, AWS

Backend: Typescript, Node, AWS

Data pipelines: Dagster, python, polars

CI/CD: GitHub Actions

What we offer 🎁

Unlimited PTO

Competitive salary and equity

Work-life balance

Lunch ordered in on us at the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays

Few meetings, so you can ship fast and focus on building

One Medical membership on us!

Top-notch medical, dental, vision, short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance

All insurance is 100% company-paid ($0 premiums) for employees and highly subsidized for dependents

FSA, HSA with company contributions, and pre-tax commuter benefits

401(k) plan

Paid parental leave ( up to 12 weeks)

Skills

Automated RemediationAWSBackend ServicesClickHouseDagsterData InfrastructureData PipelinesDistributed SystemsGitHub ActionsKubernetesMCP (likely Microsoft Conversation Protocol Not Needed)Monitoring And ObservabilityPolarsPostgreSQLPythonRustSemantic Failure ClusteringTypeScript