Senior Data Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About Spoiler Alert

Spoiler Alert is a CPG and retail tech company on a mission to expand consumer access to affordable, everyday essentials by unlocking the value in surplus inventory. We've powered the sale of over $6 billion of inventory from leading CPG brands like Unilever, Kraft Heinz, and Mondelez into hundreds of value channel retailers and wholesalers - recovering value for brands, reducing waste, and creating savings for consumers. We're building the marketplace infrastructure to transform CPG surplus into opportunity for retailers to meet consumer demand at scale, and infusing AI-native products into a segment of the CPG supply chain that is ripe for improvement.

Role

We're hiring a Senior Data Engineer to build and own the data infrastructure that powers Spoiler Alert's next chapter. Our platform generates unique data across every supplier and buyer transaction, and how well we move, model, and make that data accessible determines our company's ability to produce results for our industry. Decision intelligence, AI-powered pricing recommendations, demand matching, customer-facing analytics will all run on the foundation this role helps build.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who takes ownership of systems end-to-end and sets the bar for the team around them. You'll work at the intersection of data, product, and platform engineering, partnering closely with Data and Product teams to make our data reliable, accessible, and useful for internal decisions and for our customers. You'll bring strong opinions about what good data infrastructure looks like, use AI tools appropriately as a genuine part of how you work, and help establish what that looks like for the team.

This role reports to the CTO and partners closely with the Data and Product teams.

Responsibilities

Build & own the data platform

• Architect, build, and maintain the infrastructure that moves and transforms Spoiler Alert's marketplace data reliably and at scale, effectively incorporating AI coding tools to build with quality and velocity
• Own the analytical schema in our data warehouse that serves internal analytics, aggregate analytics, and customer-facing reporting in our data tools, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and documentation
• Design and enforce data quality standards across the stack, defining what trusted data means at Spoiler Alert and developing the monitoring and testing that upholds it
• Make intentional architectural decisions with the appropriate level of abstraction, documenting decisions and tradeoffs so the team can build confidently on your work, including data infrastructure for effective product applications of AI/ML

Raise the bar for engineering quality

• Contribute exemplary code in pipeline logic, SQL, and data modeling that other engineers learn from and build on
• Share meaningful code reviews that evolve our team's patterns and practices
• Debug and resolve data issues quickly, and drive root cause work that prevents them from recurring
• Contribute to shared support responsibilities and help build a culture of reliability across the data platform

Lead technically across the team

• Take end-to-end accountability for data systems and roadmap themes, owning projects through from design to production to iteration, communicating tradeoffs and risks along the way
• Partner with Product, Data, and Engineering teammates to ensure our pipelines, models, and tooling support reliable internal and external decision making using our data
• Identify opportunities where better data infrastructure creates leverage for Product, Data, Engineering, and Operations teams, and advocate for those investments with clarity
• Contribute meaningfully to architecture conversations and Engineering reflection, shaping technical decisions with your expertise

Qualifications

• 5–8+ years of data engineering experience, ideally at a B2B SaaS, marketplace, or data products company
• Deep hands-on expertise across the modern data stack, including pipeline tooling (we use Estuary), workflow orchestration (we use Astronomer Airflow), transformations (we use dbt), and BI tools with semantic layers (we use Holistics)
• Strong SQL and data modeling foundations for clean, well-structured models that others can build on and maintain
• Experience owning data quality end-to-end, including testing and observability frameworks infrastructure and tools with a genuine bias for reliability
• AI-native chops: you productively integrate AI into your development workflows to build with curiosity and strong opinions loosely held
• Proven ability to take accountability for systems and themes, not just individual tasks or projects. You see the work through and communicate clearly along the way.
• Ability to collaborate cross functionally with data analysts, product engineers, and non-technical stakeholders, bringing clarity to ambiguity
• Experience differentiators: marketplace or transaction-platform data, applied AI/ML pipeline work, customer-facing analytics products, food and beverage or CPG domain knowledge, experience integrating LLM tooling into data workflows

Benefits

Spoiler Alert is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all applicants and employees. Employee benefits include the following:

• Remote-first environment, with co-working access for locals in BOS, NYC, & DEN
• Competitive salary and stock option packages
• Subsidized health, dental, and vision insurance plans
• Climate-focused, pre-tax 401(k) and post-tax Roth 401(k) options
• 12-16 weeks of paid parental leave + flex return to work
• 15+ company holidays, including an "End of Year Reset Week"
• 20 vacation days and 10 sick days per year
• Focus Fridays (no meetings after 1PM local)
• Summer Fridays (1/2 day)
• Paid volunteer outings and civic engagement leave
• Annual flex funds for remote work needs, learning & development, and socializing with colleagues
• Company-sponsored $500 FSA contribution
• The salary range for this role is $140,000 - $175,000 , determined by level of experience and expertise - not a negotiation range.

We are a diverse team committed to a safe and inclusive work environment, free of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, genetics, national origin, ancestry, age, medical condition, mental or physical disability, handicap or veteran status, or marital status.

Please note that applicants should be authorized to work in the United States. Though we are interested in every qualified candidate, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time.