Senior Data Engineer — AI-Native Data Layer

Proton; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Proton seeks a Senior Data Engineer to own and grow the Data Layer, the foundation for all products and the AI brain. You’ll design end-to-end pipelines, govern ingestion, modeling, and data contracts, and guide AI agents to produce reliable, production-grade data outputs.

You will work cross-functionally with backend, AI, and product teams, tackle scale challenges, and drive architecture improvements with a startup mindset, all while enabling AI-native workflows.

Qualifications

• 7+ years hands-on data engineer experience with production ownership.
• Strong fundamentals: code and queries behavior, debugging data correctness.
• Proficient SQL and programming; build efficient pipelines and schemas.
• Hands-on orchestration of ELT pipelines against messy sources.
• Experience with a cloud data warehouse and a major cloud platform.
• Experience ingesting from file, event, and API sources.
• Knowledge of data-consistency failure modes and idempotency.

Responsibilities

• Own the Data Layer end-to-end, from ingestion to curated data serving.
• Build and operate ingestion/transformation pipelines using modern framework.
• Ingest, reconcile, and model data across medallion layers for AI use.
• Operate AI agents (Claude Code, Codex) and verify outputs.
• Define data contracts with backend, AI, and product engineers.

Skills

Data engineering

SQL

Python

ETL

Cloud data warehouse

Data modeling

Orchestration

Claude Code

Cursor agent

Codex

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Proton seeks a Senior Data Engineer to own and grow the Data Layer, the foundation for all products and the AI brain. You’ll design end-to-end pipelines, govern ingestion, modeling, and data contracts, and guide AI agents to produce reliable, production-grade data outputs.

You will work cross-functionally with backend, AI, and product teams, tackle scale challenges, and drive architecture improvements with a startup mindset, all while enabling AI-native workflows.