Lead Product Engineer, Data & AI Platform

Sweetwater is a private equity firm investing in growth- and later-stage private companies. The Lead Product Engineer will own and build the firm’s data and AI platform, turning investment and business development needs into production tools, while maintaining platform operations, integrations, security, and compliance.

Responsibilities:

• Own the data platform codebase: ingestion, entity resolution across vendors, scoring, enrichment agents, and the web interface
• Build new capability: company, fund and GP portfolio mapping, signals ideation and thesis discovery, relationship mapping across the firm’s networks, and outreach workflows
• Run production: hosting, monitoring, cost control on LLM and cloud spend, backups, and incident response
• Write tests, documentation, and agent instructions so the system remains observable and maintainable by one person plus AI tools
• Collect requests from the partners, the investment team, and the business development team, and from usage data
• Maintain a single ranked roadmap with explicit reasoning for each priority, and tactfully say no to requests that do not earn a place
• Translate loosely stated investment ideas – e.g. “flag any 2017 fund that invested in [x company] in 2021 and who the most likely motivated sellers would be” – into data models, signals, and interfaces
• Measure whether shipped features change behavior: meetings booked, signals acted on, deals sourced, and investment dollars deployed
• Own API connections among internal tooling such as our CRM, the data platform, Notion, Slack, Box, Claude, and other data vendors
• Make strategic decisions about which products serve as systems of record vs signal processors
• Manage data vendors: coverage audits, renewals input, and evaluation of sources
• Plan the longer-term data layer for time-series and document data that a CRM cannot hold
• Maintain a strong security posture across every integration, operating within the firm’s written cybersecurity, privacy, and recordkeeping policies as an SEC-registered investment adviser
• Treat data classification as a design input: what each system may hold, which AI vendors may process it, and under what terms
• Understand and follow the SEC cybersecurity and privacy requirements that apply to investment advisers
• Work within the firm’s written cybersecurity policies, incident response program, and periodic risk assessments while documenting controls well enough that they can be evidenced to SEC examiners
• Work with our Chief Compliance Officer and outside counsel on information barriers, access controls, recordkeeping, and vendor oversight
• Build automation that respects third-party terms of service, and raise the issue early when a requested approach does not