Principal Engineer, AI & Data Platform

Overview

About Bullish

Bullish is an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. These include:

• Bullish Exchange – a regulated and institutionally focused digital assets spot and derivatives exchange, integrating a high-performance central limit order book matching engine with automated market making to provide deep and predictable liquidity.
• CoinDesk Indices – a collection of tradable proprietary and single-asset benchmarks and indices that track the performance of digital assets for global institutions in the digital assets and traditional finance industries.
• CoinDesk Data - a broad suite of digital assets market data and analytics, providing real-time insights into prices, trends, and market dynamics.
• CoinDesk Insights – a digital asset media and events provider and operator of Coindesk.com, a digital media platform that covers news and insights about digital assets, the underlying markets, policy, and blockchain technology.

Reports To: Director, Engineering

Engineering Organization & Culture

At Bullish, we are engineering the institutional standard for the digital asset industry. Our mission is to build a platform where security and compliance are the foundational core, requiring a commitment to technical excellence that goes beyond simply delivering code. We operate as a global engineering organization, setting a high bar in a demanding environment for those driven to do the best work of their careers alongside world-class peers. We value engineers who treat development as a craft and own the outcome from concept to deployment. You will be expected to navigate the unknown, bring structure to ambiguity, and help shape the frameworks and processes that drive our global teams forward. We refuse to compromise on quality and seek problem solvers who thrive on high-impact technical challenges.

The Team: AI & Data Platform

The AI & Data Platform team powers intelligence across the Bullish ecosystem—from our institutional-grade cryptocurrency exchange to CoinDesk’s media, data, and indices businesses. We build the infrastructure that transforms raw data into governed, trustworthy assets and deploy AI systems that meet the reliability standards our institutional clients expect. We operate at the intersection of data engineering, semantic modeling, and applied AI—delivering solutions across the enterprise, spanning the full breadth of Bullish operations from trading floors to treasury, compliance to market intelligence. As we scale our AI capabilities, we are building a knowledge-centric architecture: one where data is not just stored and queried, but understood—by humans and agents alike. This requires a new kind of technical leader who can bridge the worlds of advanced data infrastructure and production AI systems. This is a team where AI is treated as serious engineering, not experimentation.

The Role

This is an enterprise-wide technical leadership role reporting to the Head of AI & Data Platform. Depending on experience, this will be filled at Director or Lead Engineer level. You will own the architecture and delivery of systems that make Bullish’s data not just accessible but intelligible—to business users through conversational analytics, and to AI agents through governed semantic and knowledge layers. The industry is at an inflection point. Google Cloud’s Agentic Data Cloud, BigQuery Graph, Knowledge Catalog, and MCP-native database tooling are redefining how data platforms serve autonomous agents. We need a technical leader who understands this shift deeply—not as a trend to monitor, but as an architecture to build.

What You’ll Do

• Knowledge Architecture & Semantic Infrastructure: Design and own the enterprise knowledge layer—the governed semantic models, ontologies, and knowledge graph structures that ground both human analytics and AI agents in a single source of truth. Define how business meaning flows from glossaries through data models to agent context.
• Conversational Analytics: Lead the strategy and delivery of natural-language interfaces to business data. Move beyond dashboard-driven BI toward systems where stakeholders query complex datasets conversationally and receive context-rich, citation-backed answers from governed semantic layers.
• Agentic Data Platform: Architect the infrastructure that enables AI agents to discover, reason over, and act on enterprise data. This includes MCP-based tool connectivity, agent-facing data services, and integration with emerging capabilities such as BigQuery Graph, Knowledge Catalog, and the Google Cloud Data Agent Kit.
• Advanced Data Infrastructure: Drive adoption of graph databases, knowledge bases, and hybrid query engines that support multi-hop reasoning, entity resolution, and relationship-aware analytics. Evaluate and integrate technologies at the intersection of structured data, knowledge graphs, and generative AI—including GraphRAG patterns and vector-augmented retrieval.
• Enterprise Data Strategy: Partner with domain stakeholders across trading, treasury, compliance, market intelligence, and media to ensure the data platform serves the full breadth of the business. Own cross-domain data modeling standards and govern the semantic layer that underpins all analytical and AI workloads.
• Evaluation & Trust: Establish evaluation frameworks for AI systems that consume platform data—ensuring groundedness, factual consistency, and output reliability. Build the measurement infrastructure that lets the organization trust what agents produce.
• Technical Leadership: Set architectural direction, mentor engineers, drive build-vs-buy decisions, and represent the team’s technical vision to senior stakeholders. At Director level, operate as a peer to engineering directors across the organization; at Lead level, drive technical excellence and influence architectural decisions across the platform.

What You’ll Bring

• Data & AI Platform Experience: 7+ years in data engineering, analytics, or AI platform roles. Director-level candidates will have 3+ years in a technical leadership position (Director, Principal, Staff, or equivalent); Lead Engineer candidates will have demonstrated technical ownership and mentorship in senior IC roles. Demonstrated experience building and operating enterprise-scale data platforms in production.
• Conversational Analytics & Semantic Layers: Direct experience building natural-language query systems over structured data. Deep understanding of why semantic layers, governed definitions, and business context are prerequisites for accurate conversational analytics—not afterthoughts.
• Knowledge Graphs & Advanced Data Models: Hands-on experience with graph databases, knowledge graphs, or ontology-driven data architectures. Understanding of how graph structures enable multi-hop reasoning, entity resolution, and context grounding for AI agents.
• Experience with at least 3 of the following:
• Graph databases and query languages (Neo4j, TigerGraph, Amazon Neptune, or Big-Query Graph)
• Knowledge graph construction and ontology modeling (RDF/OWL, property graphs, taxonomy design)
• GraphRAG architectures (graph-augmented retrieval for grounded generation)
• Semantic layer and business intelligence platforms (Looker, dbt Semantic Layer, AtScale)
• Vector databases and hybrid retrieval (Qdrant, Pinecone, pgvector, AlloyDB vector search)
• Cloud data platforms at scale (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, Spanner)
• Data cataloging and governance (Google Knowledge Catalog/Dataplex, Collibra, Alation, Atlan)
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) for agent-data connectivity
• Agent & AI Systems Expertise: Experience designing systems where AI agents interact with data infrastructure—including tool-use patterns, structured output generation, and agent orchestration frameworks. Understanding of evaluation methodology for AI systems (groundedness, factual consistency, hallucination measurement).
• Cloud Infrastructure: Strong GCP experience preferred (BigQuery, Cloud Composer, Vertex AI, Dataplex/Knowledge Catalog). Comfort operating in regulated, multi-region cloud environments with strict data governance requirements.
• Engineering Rigor: Track record of building observable, testable, well-documented systems. Experience with CI/CD for data and ML pipelines, data quality frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Communication & Influence: Ability to translate between deep technical architecture and business strategy. Comfortable presenting to C-suite stakeholders, aligning cross-functional teams, and making the case for long-term platform investments. You write clearly and think in systems.

Nice to Haves

• Experience in financial services, fintech, cryptocurrency, or institutional trading
• Background in data mesh, domain-oriented data ownership, or federated governance models
• Experience with Google Cloud’s Agentic Data Cloud capabilities (Knowledge Catalog, Big-Query Graph, Data Agent Kit, MCP Toolbox for Databases)
• Familiarity with dbt for transformation and data modeling at scale
• Experience building or operating streaming data infrastructure alongside batch processing
• Background in compliance-sensitive environments (SOX, regulatory reporting, audit systems)
• Published work, conference talks, or open-source contributions in knowledge engineering, semantic AI, or conversational analytics

Bullish is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are fast evolving and striving towards being a globally-diverse community. With integrity at our core, our success is driven by a talented team of individuals and the different perspectives they are encouraged to bring to work every day.