Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data

Senior Staff Software Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the transformation of our current data engineering and analytics function into a modern, scalable, product-oriented Data Platform organization. You will define the vision, architecture, operating model, and execution roadmap required to evolve from project-based data delivery to a platform that enables self-service, reliable, governed, and analytics-ready data across the company.

This is a deeply hands-on leadership role for a technical expert who actively designs systems, prototypes solutions, reviews code, and guides teams through complex challenges. You will modernize our data stack, establish platform standards, introduce best practices for reliability and governance, and enable teams across the business to build data products efficiently and safely.

In addition to platform transformation, you will ensure the data ecosystem delivers high-quality analytics and actionable insights. You will define architecture across ingestion, processing, modeling, semantic layers, analytics, and AI/ML enablement, ensuring data is trustworthy, accessible, secure, and performant.

You will work closely with engineering leadership, product teams, analytics, and executive stakeholders to align technology strategy with business outcomes, mentor engineers, and build a data-driven culture. Success in this role means not only delivering a modern platform but also elevating the team's capabilities, processes, and ways of working to operate as a true Data Platform organization.

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Define and own the end-to-end data and analytics architecture strategy
• Design scalable batch, streaming, and real-time data systems
• Establish standards for data modeling, semantic layers, and reporting
• Lead architecture reviews and technical decision-making
• Drive adoption of modern architectures (lakehouse, data mesh, real-time analytics)

Hands-On Engineering

• Design and prototype critical data platform components
• Write production-quality code for complex or high-impact areas
• Review schemas, transformations, dashboards, and analytics models
• Troubleshoot performance and reliability issues across pipelines and queries
• Optimize workloads for latency, concurrency, and cost

Data Platform & Pipeline Ownership

• Design and architect a scalable data platform supporting ingestion, transformation, and delivery of both structured and unstructured data across batch and real-time pipelines.
• Design a "Data for Agents" strategy, ensuring our data warehouse is structured with the semantic layers and metadata necessary for LLMs to navigate it accurately.
• Build AI-ready data infrastructure, including vector stores, embedding pipelines, and retrieval systems that power LLM and agentic workflows.
• Develop a RAG-ready data architecture that enables trusted enterprise data retrieval with strong lineage, governance, security, and observability.
• Create curated data products and reusable APIs that make high-quality datasets easily consumable by applications, analytics platforms, and AI agents.
• Enable self-service data access for engineering, analytics, and business teams through standardized models, semantic layers, and platform capabilities.
• Partner with AI, product, and engineering teams to support training datasets, feature stores, and production AI inference pipelines.
• Build agentic ETL/ELT pipelines that use AI agents to autonomously discover sources and generate transformations.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and resilience of the platform, including high availability, monitoring, and disaster recovery readiness.

Analytics & Business Intelligence

• Partner with product, finance, business operations, and leadership teams to define analytics needs
• Design scalable data models for reporting and advanced analytics
• Ensure analytics solutions are performant, trustworthy, and easy to use
• Drive adoption of data-driven culture through reliable insights

Governance, Quality & Security

• Define data governance, lineage, cataloging, and metadata standards
• Establish data quality frameworks and validation processes
• Ensure privacy, compliance, and secure access to sensitive data
• Implement role-based access controls and auditability

Leadership & Collaboration

• Mentor senior engineers, analytics engineers, and data scientists
• Partner with product, ML, platform, and business teams
• Translate business questions into scalable data solutions
• Influence roadmaps using data platform and analytics considerations
• Act as the executive technical authority for data and analytics

Operational Excellence

• Define SLAs/SLOs for data availability, freshness, and accuracy
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes
• Optimize cloud costs and query performance
• Support capacity planning for data growth

Culture & Enablement

• Be an evangelist for pragmatic AI adoption.
• Help establish a culture of outcome-driven innovation.

Qualifications

Required

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• 10+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data platform roles
• Proven experience architecting large-scale data and analytics systems
• Strong hands-on experience with modern data stacks in cloud environments
• Deep expertise in data modeling for analytics (dimensional, star/snowflake, Data Vault, etc.)
• Advanced SQL skills and proficiency in Python, Scala, or Java
• Advanced expertise in dimensional data modeling and semantic layers (e.g., dbt, Cube) to provide "agent-readable" context.
• Experience with distributed processing frameworks (Spark, Flink, etc.)
• Experience building reporting and BI solutions at scale
• Strong understanding of both batch and real-time architectures
• Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP data services
• Experience with BI tools (e.g., Looker, Tableau, Power BI, etc.)
• Strong understanding of data governance and security best practices
• Ability to operate at both executive and deeply technical levels

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting AI/ML pipelines and feature engineering
• Familiarity with real-time analytics and event-driven architectures
• Experience implementing semantic layers or metrics stores
• Background in high-growth SaaS or data-intensive organizations
• Experience with experimentation platforms or product analytics

Compensation

Compensation for this position includes a base salary, equity and a variety of benefits. The U.S. base salary range for this role is $235,000 - $285,000 USD. Actual base salaries will be based on candidate-specific factors, including experience, skillset, and location, and local minimum pay requirements as applicable.

Benefits include:

• Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family
• Life insurance
• Mental wellness coverage
• Fertility and growing family support
• Flex Time Off in addition to company paid holidays
• Paid family leave, medical leave, and bereavement leave policies
• Retirement saving plans
• Allowance to customize your work and technology setup at home
• Annual professional development stipend

Your recruiter can provide additional details about compensation and benefits.