Data Platform Engineer — Observability & Governance

Appfolio; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 152,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio seeks a senior Data Engineer to own the operational backbone of the Business Data Platform. You will drive observability, data security, and governance across Snowflake, dbt, and BI tools, enabling scalable analytics and AI-driven decision-making.

You will lead the design of self-service data access, maintain data lineage, and advance Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code while partnering with Security, Compliance, and Analytics teams to ensure robust data governance and compliance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in DataOps, Data Platform Engineering, DevOps, or related roles within modern cloud data environments.
• Proficiency in data engineering tools and technologies - SQL, Python, Airflow, Mulesoft, Linux scripting, and dbt.
• Strong Experience with cloud technology, especially AWS tech stack (s3, ec2, eks), Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with cloud data warehouse technology, such as Snowflake, including data security and governance.
• Advanced proficiency with Airflow.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, codespaces, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform etc.).
• Experience with building self-serve processes
• Familiarity with security standards and practices for data (IAM, encryption, audit logging).
• Familiar with Snowflake RBAC, object privileges, masking policies, row-access policies, and secure UDFs/SPROCs to support both data engineering and ML/AI workloads.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, build, and maintenance of AppFolio's Business Data Platform's observability and testing solutions that identify reliability, scalability, or data quality issues and strive to continuously improve the platform.
• Own the CI/CD architecture for our Github repositories — build the automated checks, deployment pipelines, and orchestration that every team's changes run through, and keep that platform running as new teams and use cases plug into it.
• Manage service accounts, roles, and permissions across Snowflake, dbt, and BI tools.
• Own the creation of and performance of Data Pipeline SLOs.
• Create and enforce data access controls, masking policies, and encryption standards (at rest and in transit).
• Define and own access governance for AI-driven data consumption — scoping Snowflake Coco, MCP server, and agent tool access (e.g., Chat-to-Data) with least-privilege, read-by-default, and full audit logging as agents take on more direct data access.
• Partner with InfoSec and Compliance to ensure auditability and privacy frameworks are implemented and upheld across the Business Data Platform.
• Maintain lineage and metadata documentation across key data domains.
• Implement and manage infrastructure-as-code for data platform components.
• Drive automation of routine operations (e.g., environment provisioning, credential rotation, usage monitoring).
• Partner with data engineers, data science engineers, data scientists, and analysts to improve platform usability and self-service capabilities.
• Document and evangelize best practices for data access, job orchestration, and environment management.

Skills

SQL

Python

Airflow

dbt

Linux scripting

GitOps

Tools

Snowflake

Unix/Linux

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub

Job description

AppFolio seeks a senior Data Engineer to own the operational backbone of the Business Data Platform. You will drive observability, data security, and governance across Snowflake, dbt, and BI tools, enabling scalable analytics and AI-driven decision-making.

You will lead the design of self-service data access, maintain data lineage, and advance Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code while partnering with Security, Compliance, and Analytics teams to ensure robust data governance and compliance.