First Data Engineer: Build Our Data Platform & Pipelines

Serval Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Serval Inc. in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Data Engineer to own the entire data stack from day one, consolidating data across in-product, CRM, marketing, billing, support, and finance into a single warehouse and building pipelines, models, and a self-serve layer.

You will partner with engineering, product, and GTM teams to define gold-standard metrics, ensure data quality and governance, and build AI-enhanced internal tools. Strong SQL, Python, and cloud experience are essential.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering and business analytics, with hands-on experience building and maintaining data warehouses and pipelines.
• Expert SQL, including PostgreSQL, and strong Python for pipeline development, scripting, and tooling.
• Experience standing up a modern data warehouse or lakehouse from scratch (Snowflake, Databricks, or comparable) and building the ETL/ELT pipelines transform data into usable production databases using a modern stack (e.g.m Fivetran, DBT).
• Hands-on experience with AWS and infrastructure as code (Terraform) for managing cloud data infrastructure.
• Track record of owning data projects end to end and exercising sound judgment independently, ideally as an early or first data hire.
• Strong product intuition and business curiosity: you can translate business questions into clean, usable data models, know what's worth measuring, and collaborate with a wide variety of technical & non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable with the pace and ambiguity of a fast-growing startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Stand up our first unified data warehouse and own it end to end: modeling, pipelines, data quality, and performance, treating it like a product the whole company can rely on.
• Partner with teams across the business to turn ambiguous questions into clear requirements and metrics the whole company aligns on.
• Consolidate data from our production Postgres databases and SaaS systems (product usage, CRM, marketing, billing, support, finance) into a single source of truth, and push clean data back into the tools teams work in.
• Design clean, performant data models with clear lineage, standardized nomenclature, and well maintained documentation to support self-serve BI.
• Build internal data tools with applied AI, using Serval's own agents to turn recurring data questions into self-serve answers.
• Own data quality, governance, and security from day one, so it's built in rather than bolted on later.
• Make the vendor, tooling, and architecture calls for the data stack, keeping it lean and cost-aware.
• Define the data engineering practices and standards the future team will build on.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data warehousing

Data modeling

Stakeholder collaboration

Education

Degree in Computer Science or related engineering field

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

Fivetran

DBT

Go

gRPC

React

TypeScript

Kubernetes

AWS

Terraform

Job description

Serval Inc. in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Data Engineer to own the entire data stack from day one, consolidating data across in-product, CRM, marketing, billing, support, and finance into a single warehouse and building pipelines, models, and a self-serve layer.

You will partner with engineering, product, and GTM teams to define gold-standard metrics, ensure data quality and governance, and build AI-enhanced internal tools. Strong SQL, Python, and cloud experience are essential.