Query Infra Team Lead

Zafran is building the next generation of vulnerability and risk management. Our platform brings together security, asset, vulnerability, exposure, and business context from many systems — then turns that data into clear investigation, prioritization, and action.

We’re creating a new Query Infra to own the investigation infrastructure of Zafran’s data layer for the Platform. This team will take over the infrastructure behind our investigation databases and search capabilities.

Data Infra will own the foundations behind Zafran’s data layer: infrastructure, modeling, performance, reliability, and query capabilities on top of our investigation databases. Other product and engineering teams will build customer-facing experiences, workflows, dashboards, and insights on top of the capabilities this team provides.

We’re looking for an experienced Query Infra Team Lead to build and lead this team — someone who comes from deep data infrastructure, analytical databases, search infrastructure, and large-scale querying, and who wants to shape one of the most important technical foundations of Zafran’s platform.

About Zafran:

Our Mission: To stop the exploitation of vulnerabilities, everywhere.

What makes us different: Zafran de-risks 90% of critical vulnerabilities overnight across your hybrid environment and utilizes Agentic Capabilities and your existing security tools to rapidly mitigate and remediate the 10% most likely to be exploited.

​​Who’s behind us: Zafran is backed by Menlo Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, and a deep belief that cybersecurity should move as fast as attackers do. We’re one of the fastest-growing companies in the industry, scaling to meet demand from the world’s most advanced, security-obsessed organizations.

We’re serious about our mission- so expect work that matters, teammates who challenge and inspire you, and plenty of fun along the way!

What you’ll do

• Create, build and lead Zafran’s Data Infra team from the ground up.

• Own the infrastructure of Zafran’s investigation data layer for the Platform.

• Turn Zafran’s investigation infrastructure into a dedicated, well-defined platform capability.

• Design and evolve the data models, schemas, indexing strategies, and query patterns that power Zafran’s investigation databases.

• Lead the architecture, operation, and scaling of the databases and search infrastructure that power investigation, analytics, and query use cases across the platform.

• Partner closely with Product, Backend, DevOps, Security Research, and customer-facing engineering teams to define clear boundaries, contracts, and data-layer APIs.

• Make the data layer reliable, observable, cost-efficient, and performant across many tenants and large volumes of security data.

• Set engineering standards for schema design, data modeling, query optimization, migrations, backfills, and data-quality monitoring.

• Mentor engineers, review technical designs, and raise the bar for how Zafran builds and operates data infrastructure.

• Stay hands-on: this is a leadership role for someone who can still go deep into architecture, production issues, performance bottlenecks, and complex queries.

What you bring

• 4+ years of experience as a Team Lead or Engineering Manager of a data infrastructure, platform, backend infrastructure, or database-oriented team.

• 4+ years of hands-on experience with large-scale analytical databases, data platforms, or search infrastructure.

• Deep understanding of data modeling, query optimization, indexing, partitioning, storage layouts, and performance tradeoffs.

• Production experience with ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, or similar systems (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, OpenSearch).

• Strong backend fundamentals and the ability to design reliable, scalable, observable, and maintainable systems.

• Experience running data systems in production: monitoring, incident response, capacity planning, cost management, migrations, and backfills.

• Ability to define clean interfaces between platform teams and product teams.

• A leadership style that combines technical depth, ownership, mentorship, and cross-team collaboration.

• Comfort in a fast-moving startup where the team is still being shaped.

Nice to have

• Hands-on ClickHouse experience in production.

• Hands-on ElasticSearch experience in production.

• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS data architectures.

• Experience with streaming or event-driven ingestion pipelines, including Kafka or similar technologies.

• Background in cybersecurity, vulnerability management, exposure management, CTEM, SIEM, EDR, CNAPP, CSPM, or related security-data domains.

• Experience building a new team, owning a platform capability, or extracting infrastructure ownership from a product team.

• Experience supporting analytical or investigation-heavy product use cases.

Why this role matters

Zafran’s product depends on making complex security data usable, searchable, explainable, and actionable. The Data Infra team will own the technical layer that makes this possible.

This is a chance to define how Zafran models and queries investigation data, how our product teams consume it, and how our platform scales as customer data grows. You’ll be joining at the moment where the data layer becomes a dedicated platform discipline — and you’ll have the opportunity to shape both the architecture and the team behind it.