Senior Data Engineer — Build Scalable Data Pipelines & ML Infra

Lever, Inc.; San Mateo (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Firework is seeking an experienced Senior/Staff Data Engineer to design, build, and scale our data infrastructure. You will develop reliable, high‑performance data pipelines powering analytics, BI, product development, and data‑driven decision making across the organization.

The ideal candidate is a hands‑on engineer with deep expertise in modern data architectures and a passion for scalable, maintainable data solutions, with potential to lead engineering best practices across the company.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering or a closely related field
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL with advanced querying and optimization
• Experience building and maintaining large‑scale ETL/ELT pipelines and distributed data processing systems
• Hands‑on experience with Snowflake, BigQuery, or Iceberg
• Experience with data processing frameworks such as Apache Spark or Flink
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS or GCP
• Strong understanding of data modeling, database design, and data architecture principles
• Experience implementing data quality, monitoring, and reliability practices in production
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills with the ability to independently drive complex technical projects
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Demonstrated leadership potential and a genuine interest in growing into a people management role

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and implement backend and machine learning data infrastructure — including event‑based data ingestions, stream processing, data warehouse, data pipelines, visualization, analytics and applications
• Build analytics tools that utilize the data pipeline to provide actionable insights into customer acquisition, operational efficiency and other key business performance metrics and develop and maintain distributed data pipelines for ETL, feature engineering, and model running
• Create data tools for analytics and data scientist team members that assist them in building and optimizing our product into an innovative industry leader, and keep our data separated and secure across national boundaries through multiple data centers and AWS regions
• Work with data and analytics experts to strive for greater functionality in our data systems and our end‑to‑end data processing, troubleshooting, and problem diagnosis, performance benchmark, load balance, and code reviews
• Mentor other data engineers, providing technical guidance, sharing best practices, and supporting their professional development

Skills

Python

SQL

ETL pipelines

Data modeling

Data architecture

Spark

Flink

Airflow

AWS

GCP

Tools

Snowflake

BigQuery

Iceberg

Apache Spark

Flink

Dagster

Prefect

AWS

GCP

Job description

Firework is seeking an experienced Senior/Staff Data Engineer to design, build, and scale our data infrastructure. You will develop reliable, high‑performance data pipelines powering analytics, BI, product development, and data‑driven decision making across the organization.

The ideal candidate is a hands‑on engineer with deep expertise in modern data architectures and a passion for scalable, maintainable data solutions, with potential to lead engineering best practices across the company.