Staff Agentic Data Engineer - Data Platform

Are you looking for more in life than just building another data pipeline? Does upending cybersecurity resonate with you? We're a rapidly expanding cybersecurity company revolutionizing vulnerability management for organizations of all sizes. For our customers, vulnerability management has historically been a game of catch-up, with fragmented data, limited asset coverage, and manual processes.

Nucleus' primary mission is to create a fast, scalable platform that brings together large volumes of security data and transforms it into actionable insights, making vulnerability management simple, efficient, and effective.

We're looking for a Staff / Principal Data Engineer to help define and evolve the architecture behind our data platform. This is a senior technical leadership role for an engineer who thrives on solving complex data problems at scale, designing systems that process large and growing datasets, and establishing patterns that other engineers can build upon.

What You Will Do

• Own the architecture and evolution of large-scale data processing and analytics systems, from ingestion and normalization through transformation, aggregation, and customer-facing analytics.

• Design and evolve data models that support high-volume analytical workloads while balancing query performance, storage efficiency, maintainability, and scalability.

• Design and optimize complex analytical SQL queries operating across large datasets, identifying performance bottlenecks and developing scalable solutions.

• Architect distributed and asynchronous job processing systems capable of reliably processing large volumes of data across concurrent workloads.

• Design and evolve Spark, Flink or similar technologies based data processing workflows for large-scale transformation, enrichment, aggregation, and computation.

• Drive the effective use of SingleStore/MemSQL, including schema design, indexing and partitioning strategies, query optimization, and workload design.

• Establish architectural patterns for batch processing, data transformation, job orchestration, failure recovery, idempotency, and reprocessing.

• Diagnose complex performance and scalability issues across databases, distributed processing systems, application services, and infrastructure.

• Partner with engineering and product teams to translate ambiguous analytical and data-processing requirements into scalable technical architectures.

• Define technical standards and reusable patterns for data modeling, data processing, and analytical query development.

• Provide technical leadership across engineering initiatives, influencing architecture and mentoring engineers while remaining deeply hands-on with implementation.

• Identify architectural limitations before they become operational problems and lead improvements that increase the scalability, reliability, and performance of the platform.

The Following Skills and Experience Are Key to Succeeding in This Role

• 10+ years of professional software engineering, data engineering, or data platform experience, with significant experience designing and operating production data systems.

• Deep expertise in relational and analytical data modeling, including designing schemas for large-scale analytical and reporting workloads.

• Expert-level SQL, with demonstrated experience designing, analyzing, and optimizing complex analytical queries over large datasets.

• Strong experience with SingleStore/MemSQL or comparable distributed SQL/analytical database technologies.

• Significant hands-on experience with Spark, Flink or similar technologies, including designing and optimizing distributed data-processing workloads.

• Strong understanding of distributed data processing, including partitioning, parallelism, data skew, resource utilization, and performance optimization.

• Experience designing high-throughput job processing systems, including scheduling, concurrency management, retries, failure recovery, idempotency, and observability.

• Experience designing data pipelines that support batch ingestion, transformation, enrichment, aggregation, and downstream analytics.

• Strong understanding of database performance characteristics, including indexing, partitioning, query execution plans, data distribution, and memory/compute trade-offs.

• Experience identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks across application, database, and data-processing layers.

• Proficiency in Python, Java or another production programming language used to build data-processing and distributed systems.

• Strong understanding of testing strategies for data-intensive systems, including unit, integration, data-quality, and end-to-end testing.

• Proven ability to independently own technically ambiguous problems and drive them from investigation through production implementation.

• Demonstrated ability to influence architecture and technical direction across multiple teams without relying solely on organizational authority.

• Ability to communicate complex data architecture and performance trade-offs clearly to engineers, product stakeholders, and technical leadership.

• Ability to collaborate effectively with distributed teams across multiple time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep production experience with SingleStore/MemSQL, particularly with large-scale analytical workloads.

• Advanced experience with pipeline performance tuning, partitioning strategies, memory management, and optimization of large distributed workloads.

• Experience designing platforms that support a combination of high-volume ingestion and low-latency analytical queries.

• Experience building or operating distributed job execution and orchestration systems.

• Experience with large-scale cybersecurity, vulnerability, asset, telemetry, or event datasets.

• Experience working with vulnerability scanning technologies across the security stack, including SCA, SAST, DAST, IAST, vulnerability scanning, and container security.

• Experience designing systems for incremental processing, backfills, replay/reprocessing, deduplication, and late-arriving data.

• Experience with data observability and operational monitoring for large-scale processing workloads.

• Experience integrating AI/LLM-driven capabilities with data platforms, including preparing and processing large datasets for AI-assisted analytical workflows.

• Experience operating data-intensive applications on Linux and cloud infrastructure.

• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies in a professional engineering environment.

Why You Should Be Excited

• Nucleus is a truly unique solution that’s defining a market AND making an actual impact.
• We’re biased, but you will get to work with one of the best teams in security. We have a lot to get done and we work extremely hard, but we have fun in the process.
• This role has the opportunity to directly influence how Nucleus approaches data architecture, analytical processing, and scalability as the platform and the datasets it processes continue to grow.
• Outstanding benefits include flexible PTO, 401k company contribution (not a match, a contribution), generous education and training budget, 100% company-paid healthcare, fully remote work, and more.

Additional Information
At Nucleus we are committed to achieving excellence in our field by combining diversity, collaboration, teamwork, and pride in our work. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability.