Head of Engineering

We're Ooak Data

Ooak Data turns company data into training data for AI agents.

Frontier labs can train models to reason. They cannot train them to work: navigating a real company's Slack threads, half-finished Notion docs, contradictory Jira tickets, and permission boundaries. That requires real enterprise data, and you cannot synthesize it. You have to source it.

We plug into enterprise tools, anonymize everything into a structurally identical digital twin, and generate reinforcement-learning environments with expert-level tasks calibrated against frontier models.

We are a Y Combinator company with 8 figures contracts signed with frontier AI labs, and we are scaling delivery aggressively over the next months.

🤝 Our values

• Trust, the foundation of every relationship, internal and external. We extend it by default and value the ownership that comes with it.
• Ambition, we commit, we move fast, with tenacity and efficiency.
• Collective, team first, low ego.
• Kindness, at the heart of every interaction.

The offer

📍 Location: Paris (city center), on-site with 1 to 2 days WFH

🕐 Start: as soon as you are available

💼 Contract: full-time (CDI)

💰 Compensation: €100k to €130k + equity (BSPCE)

✅ Your missions

As Head of Engineering, you'll build and lead the engineering team that delivers Ooak Data's core product to frontier labs. You'll report directly to Thomas (CTO & co-founder).

The role has three layers:

• Own the ingestion and anonymization platform. You lead the squad that plugs into our partners' tools, ingests full company data ecosystems, and anonymizes them into structurally identical digital twins. This is the heart of what we ship to the labs: the volumes, the quality, and the trust of our partners depend on it.
• Manage your squad. Hire, onboard, and grow the engineers in your perimeter. Set the pace, the priorities, and the delivery rhythm.
• Lead engineering across the company. Transverse management of all software and data engineers: engineering practices, technical standards, architecture decisions, code quality, hiring bar, and career growth.

Concretely, over your first 12 months:

• Scale the team with the founders: interviewing, closing, onboarding.
• Structure the engineering org: squads, rituals, delivery process, documentation, on-call, and the way we work with product and ops.
• Ship at scale: the ingestion and anonymization pipeline has to absorb hundreds of company data ecosystems over the next year, reliably and with auditable quality.
• Set the technical direction with Thomas: tech choices, design patterns, scalability, security, and infrastructure.
• Stay hands-on at the start: you code and review in the first months, then step back as the team grows.

🔍 Who we're looking for

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years leading engineers as an Engineering Manager, Head of Engineering, VP Eng or CTO.
• You have grown a team from a few people to 15-30 engineers, and you know what breaks along the way: hiring, onboarding, process, architecture.
• Strong technical depth on data-intensive back-end systems: Python, SQL, distributed pipelines, cloud infrastructure (GCP or equivalent). You are still credible in a code review.
• A track record of shipping in a demanding, fast-moving environment: start-up or scale-up, ideally from early stage.
• High bar on quality and security: we handle our partners' most sensitive data. You care about access control, auditability, and doing things properly.
• Team first, low ego: you lead by clarity and trust, you give hard feedback with kindness, and you make the people around you better.
• Comfortable working closely with founders, product, and ops in a company where priorities move fast.
• Fluent English, mandatory (working language with our clients and the labs).

The extras that make the difference

• Experience with data engineering at scale: ETL/ELT, orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, etc), warehouses and lakes.
• Experience with data anonymization, privacy, or security-sensitive systems.
• Strong interest in AI, RL environments, and how frontier models are trained.
• TypeScript on the side, for the platform.

🎁 Why join us

• Entrepreneurial adventure: founding impact, live the early days of an ambitious company at the front line of the AI revolution.
• Backed by Y Combinator, join just as we accelerate.
• Offices in central Paris.
• Perks: Alan health insurance (mutuelle), 50% Navigo covered.
• Competitive package including bspce.

Interview Process

✏️ Recruitment process

We move fast.

• A 30 min intro call with Grégoire (co-founder)
• A 60 min deep dive with Thomas (CTO & co-founder): your track record, technical judgment, how you lead
• A leadership case: presented to Thomas and a tech member
• A final fit interview with 2 founders
• Reference calls