[Hiring] Staff Data Engineer - AI Platform @TRM Labs

Role Description

Build a Safer World. TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. TRM's platforms enable investigators to trace illicit activity, build cases, and construct operating pictures of threat networks. Leading agencies and businesses worldwide rely on TRM to make the world safer and more secure.

TRM's government cloud environment gives public sector investigators the same real-time analytical power our commercial customers rely on, and this role keeps that environment fast, reliable, and compliant as it scales. You'll join the Data Platform Serving team, working on the StarRocks-backed serving layer that sits underneath government cloud investigations, alongside the engineer who currently owns this domain solo. This is a chance to build hands-on distributed systems experience in one of the most operationally demanding environments at TRM: a regulated, high-availability government cloud deployment.

The impact you will have:

• You will own performance tuning on the StarRocks serving layer, using AI-assisted query profiling (Claude, internal tooling) to find and fix slow query patterns before they become customer-facing incidents.
• You will build and harden data pipelines feeding government cloud investigations, using AI code review workflows to ship reliable changes faster in a high-compliance environment where mistakes are costly.
• You will reduce single-point-of-failure risk on GovCloud data infrastructure by becoming the second engineer who can independently operate and troubleshoot the serving layer, cutting incident response time when the primary owner is unavailable.
• You will use AI-assisted debugging and log analysis to triage production issues in a regulated environment, turning multi-hour investigations into rapid root-cause fixes.

Qualifications

• U.S. citizenship is required for this role due to government cloud data access requirements.
• Hands-on experience operating distributed OLAP or serving-layer systems (StarRocks, Trino, ClickHouse, or similar), including query tuning and performance optimization at scale.
• Experience owning data pipeline reliability and incident response, and comfort using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, or similar) to accelerate debugging, code review, and documentation.
• Independent ownership mindset: you can pick up an unfamiliar piece of production infrastructure, use AI-assisted research and code exploration to ramp quickly, and take on-call responsibility with minimal oversight.

Team Operating Rhythms

• Weekly team sync to review open incidents, in-flight infrastructure work, and upcoming compliance milestones.
• Async daily updates in Slack on pipeline health, ongoing tickets, and blockers.
• Sprint-based planning cycles with clear ownership assigned per workstream.
• Retro after any production incident to capture learnings and adjust runbooks.

Life at TRM

We are building a safer world. That promise shows up in how we work every day. TRM moves quickly. We are a high velocity, high ownership team that expects clarity, follow-through, and impact. People who thrive here are energized by hard problems, experimentation, and continuous feedback. If something takes months elsewhere, it will ship here in days.

Our work sits at the intersection of AI, national security, and fighting crime. The problems are complex, the stakes are real, and the environment evolves quickly. The pace and intensity of the work reflect the importance of the mission. As a result, the way we operate requires a high level of ownership, adaptability, collaboration, and creative problem-solving.

At TRM, you should expect:

• Priorities and targets to change quickly as we experiment and iterate.
• Work that often requires operating with a high degree of ambiguity.
• A high level of personal ownership and accountability.
• Close collaboration across teams and functions.
• Frequent, high-touch communication.
• Creative problem solving and out-of-the-box thinking.
• A pace that rewards urgency, adaptability, and outcomes.

AI Fluency at TRM

AI fluency is a baseline expectation at TRM. We believe AI meaningfully changes how top performers operate. We expect every team member to use AI to accelerate and reimagine their craft, not just automate surface tasks.

At TRM, AI fluency means you are among the top 10 percent of operators in your function in how you apply AI to:

• Accelerate repeatable workflows.
• Structure and solve problems.
• Improve output quality.
• Increase speed and leverage.

You will be evaluated on applied AI fluency during the interview process.

Leadership Principles

We hire and grow against three leadership principles. They’re the standards for how we operate, treat each other, and make decisions.

• Impact-Oriented Trailblazer: We put customers first and move with speed, focus, and adaptability. We treat every plan like an experiment – test, ship, measure, and iterate quickly.
• Master Craftsperson: We care deeply about our craft. We balance speed with high standards, own outcomes end‑to‑end, and invest in getting better every day.
• Inspiring Colleague: We add clarity and energy, not noise. We bring humility, candor, and a one‑team mindset — giving and receiving feedback to make the team stronger.

Join our Mission

At TRM we care deeply about our craft. We are looking for individuals who want their work to matter, who experiment with speed and rigor, and who take pride in building a safer world for billions of people. If you’re excited by TRM’s mission but don’t check every box, we encourage you to apply — we hire for slope, judgment, and the will to learn fast.

TRM is a Series C company with $220M in total funding, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Y Combinator, Thoma Bravo, and others. Headquartered in San Francisco, TRM operates as a distributed-first company with hubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore.