CandidatesReach

← Back to Starburst overview

Head of Engineering, AI Platform

🏢 Starburst · 📍 India
⚡ Direct Talent Broker Referral
Why apply through CandidatesReach?
✔ Tailored Executive Endorsement Letter: Highlight your real strengths and verified background directly to hiring leads.
✔ Your Preferred Screening Terms: Choose between a 1-minute quick phone screen or scheduled email calendar.
✔ $500 Cash Hiring Bonus: Receive $500 direct cash reward after 30 days of active employment.

Position Summary & Responsibilities

About Starburst

Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by giving organizations secure, governed access to all their data, wherever it lives. Built for distributed data environments, Starburst helps enterprises power AI and analytics without the cost and complexity of traditional data consolidation. With open standards including Trino and Apache Iceberg, Starburst enables trusted access to complete enterprise context while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in. Leading global enterprises trust Starburst to fuel AI, analytics, and enterprise intelligence. Learn more at starburst.ai.

About SAIL

Starburst helps the world's largest enterprises access and analyze their data wherever it lives. SAIL is the team behind AIDA, Starburst's AI product that lets enterprise users ask questions about their data in plain English and get trusted answers. Our AI runs in some of the most demanding enterprise environments in the world, which means it has to meet a bar most AI products never face. Answers must be correct, safe, auditable, and fast.

About the role

SAIL Platform in India starts with you. This is not a satellite team. You will own a charter, hire the engineers who deliver it, and be accountable for outcomes that customers feel.

The charter is the agent platform, and it has three arcs.

  1. Internal agent platform. The foundation Starburst's own teams build agents on today, spanning the agent SDK, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and model serving infrastructure. Your users are Starburst's own engineers, and their feedback lands in hours, not quarters.
  2. Extending it toward customers. Take what proves itself internally and harden it for customer-facing use cases. That means multi-tenancy, security boundaries, and APIs stable enough to run in environments we do not control.
  3. Observability. What an agent did, why it did it, what it cost, and how well it performed, for both audiences. Internal teams need it to debug and improve; external customers need it to trust agents with production workloads.

You serve two customer bases in sequence, internal agent teams first, external enterprises as the platform matures.

You will be a player-coach. In the first months you will build alongside the first hires you make. As the team gro

🎯 Candidate Preparation Guide For Starburst Applicants

Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights

Key Role Focus:

Interviewers strictly evaluate distributed query optimization expertise, deep Trino/Presto knowledge, and the ability to solve massive cross-cloud data federation challenges.

📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):
  • 1. Treating SQL engines as black boxes without understanding execution plan optimization.
  • 2. Lack of enterprise customer empathy regarding data security and governance.
  • 3. Theoretical knowledge lacking hands-on debugging of petabyte-scale queries.
✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I optimize distributed SQL query engines to radically accelerate analytics across complex, petabyte-scale enterprise data meshes.

🔒 Free Candidate Preparation Access

Unlock Preparation Priorities & Alignment Hook

Sign in below to review role alignment recommendations before submitting your referral.

🤝 Talent Broker Referral · $500 Bonus Included

Apply for Head of Engineering, AI Platform

Setup your contact terms & referral note to get recommended directly to the hiring lead at Starburst.

⚡ Continue with Google (Instant Setup)
or with email

Already have an account? Sign in here