Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform
Staff Software Engineer on the central data platform team, responsible for architecture, ingestion, orchestration, streaming, governance, and self-service data tooling. Requires 10+ years building production data infrastructure and deep experience with warehouses, CDC, streaming, orchestration, Python, and SQL.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Own the data platform architecture and technical direction, including reusable frameworks and build-versus-buy decisions.
- Build and operate ingestion across streaming, batch, CDC, and third-party connectors.
- Design schema evolution that safely absorbs upstream changes.
- Land data in Snowflake with predictable freshness, completeness, and cost characteristics.
- Own orchestration for scheduling, retries, backfills, and dependency management.
- Build transformation, compute, and self-service pipeline frameworks.
- Design and operate stream-processing infrastructure for real-time product features, alerting, and reporting.
- Build data quality, observability, reconciliation, anomaly detection, lineage, cataloging, and discovery capabilities.
- Develop tooling for PII classification, masking, retention, access control, and multi-region data residency.
- Establish technical standards through design reviews, documentation, and mentorship.
Requirements
- 10+ years building and operating production data infrastructure and systems used by other teams.
- Deep experience with cloud data warehouses, especially Snowflake, including performance tuning and cost management.
- Experience building CDC and streaming pipelines with Kafka, Debezium, Flink, or Spark Streaming.
- Experience with managed ingestion tools such as Fivetran or Airbyte.
- Strong fluency with workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal, Airflow, or Dagster.
- Strong Python programming and advanced SQL skills.
- Experience building frameworks or internal tooling for other engineers.
- Experience with data quality, observability, lineage, and schema evolution.
- Working knowledge of data governance in regulated environments, including PII classification, masking, access control, retention, and data residency.
- Familiarity with Azure, AWS, or GCP, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi.
- Ability to operate in ambiguity and define scope.
Nice to Have
- Experience with dbt and analytics engineering teams.
- Experience with lakehouse architectures, Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Trino.
- Experience operating multi-tenant platforms with strict security, compliance, or data residency requirements.
- Exposure to data infrastructure for AI products.
- Experience as an early or founding data platform hire at a fast-growing company.
Compensation
- $231,000–$340,000 USD annual compensation.
Skills
Snowflake, Python, SQL, Kafka, Debezium, Apache Flink, Spark, Fivetran, Airbyte, Airflow, Kubernetes, Terraform, dbt, Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake
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