Engineering Lead, Platform & AI

About Daydream

Daydream is the first chat-based shopping agent built exclusively for fashion. Designed to redefine how people search and discover fashion, Daydream offers a personalized, conversational experience powered by advanced AI and natural language understanding.

Backed by top-tier investors including Forerunner Ventures, Index Ventures, Google Ventures, and True Ventures, our team is committed to shaping the future of shopping.

About the role

As the Engineering Lead, Platform & AI, you'll own multiple backend systems at Daydream: the catalog data pipeline that powers our product index, the AI content pipeline that builds landing pages for ad campaigns, and the B2B integration layer that puts our search on partner retail sites. The work is mostly Python and Go, involves a lot of LLM integration, and what you build shows up directly in the product.

What you'll do

Catalog pipeline

• Own the augmentation pipeline - a multi-step Polars system that runs ML models (image analysis, hero selection, swatches via Vertex AI), normalizes sizes, appends affiliate links, and writes to Delta Lake / GCS
• Drive catalog quality: OOS accuracy, hero image selection, sizing coverage
• Build and maintain scrapers and mappers for 100+ fashion merchants across Shopify, custom sites, and affiliate networks
• Over time, take ownership of the enrichment layer: attribute extraction, taxonomy, and Elasticsearch indexing

Content generation pipeline

• Own the AI content pipeline - a multi-step system that uses LLM for topic generation and for product matching, quality scoring, and landing page assembly
• Improve prompt quality and LLM output evaluation
• Drive the next phase: personalized content for logged-in users, email content, expanded ad formats

B2B merchant integration

• Build and operate services that expose core Daydream capabilities to merchant partners
• Deploy on Kubernetes via Helm and ArgoCD

Across all three

• Own production reliability: monitoring, incidents, root-cause fixes
• Decide when and how to use AI
• Work with product, ML, and design

Who you are

• You have a strong backend engineer with production Python experience. Go is a big plus.
• You’ve done something real with LLMs: prompt engineering, multi-step workflows, output evaluation. Not just played with the API.
• You are comfortable with cloud infrastructure: GCP (BigQuery, GCS), Kubernetes, GitOps
• You have built and run systems at scale, whether data pipelines, API services, or batch processing
• You are analytical and fast. You ramp into unfamiliar code quickly and make pragmatic calls
• You use AI tools well in your own workflow
• You are self-directed, comfortable owning multiple systems without a lot of process
• Based in New York
• Nice to have: gRPC / Protocol Buffers, Polars/Pandas, Scrapy, Argo Workflows, Elasticsearch, Delta Lake, Airtable or Contentful API

What we offer

• Competitive salary, equity and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401k, etc.)
• Flexible vacation and remote working
• The opportunity to be part of a groundbreaking, AI-focused company.
• Collaborative work environment with a team of talented, fun-loving individuals.
• Opportunity to learn and grow in your career while shaping the future of fashion, shopping and technology.
• Small team, high ownership, direct product impact

Commitment to Diversity

Daydream is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, or disability status.