Lead Data Platform Engineer for City Data Services

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

City and County of San Francisco DataSF seeks a principal engineer to lead its data practice, owning the department-facing experience and translating departmental needs into scalable platform solutions.

You will start as an individual contributor, partnering with analytics engineers, and may grow to manage a small team as the practice expands, shaping governance, data quality, and self-service data access for city departments.

Qualifications

• Minimum qualifications as listed: associate degree or equivalent; five years of experience with systems/platform components.
• Strong hands-on data platform or data engineering background building and operating pipelines, data modeling, and governance are preferred.
• Experience translating departmental needs into technical work and driving platform adoption.

Responsibilities

• Own the full department engagement lifecycle—from initial conversation through scoping, onboarding, delivery, and ongoing support.
• Define and publish the DataSF service catalog with measurable criteria for standard work vs. scoped projects.
• Partner with departments to model data domains and translate needs into actionable requirements for the platform.
• Shape analytics engineering practices including dbt models, pipelines, data quality, and reusable standards.
• Build self-service pathways for departments to access data and assess trustworthiness.

Skills

Data engineering

Analytics engineering

SQL

Stakeholder management

Education

Associate degree in CS/CE/IS

Equivalent qualification / 60+ credits

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

ETL pipelines

Job description

City and County of San Francisco DataSF seeks a principal engineer to lead its data practice, owning the department-facing experience and translating departmental needs into scalable platform solutions.

You will start as an individual contributor, partnering with analytics engineers, and may grow to manage a small team as the practice expands, shaping governance, data quality, and self-service data access for city departments.