Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer

Engg; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Aircall is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to lead platform-driven data infrastructure, enabling analytics teams to build faster on scalable lakehouse technologies. You will own ingestion, storage, and governance, collaborating with data scientists and engineers to ensure reliability and performance.

You will drive end-to-end data pipelines, implement IaC and CI/CD practices, and partner with AI workflows to support real-time analytics and decision making.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in data engineering, data platform or infra engineering.
• Strong Python and SQL, with experience building reusable frameworks.
• Production experience with an orchestration framework at scale (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect).
• Hands-on Apache Spark and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Deep AWS experience (S3, EKS/ECS, IAM, Glue/Athena).
• Familiar with Kubernetes, Docker, and CI/CD, IaC (Terraform).
• Track record owning reliability: SLAs, monitoring, on-call.
• Daily use of AI coding tools as part of infrastructure work.
• Excellent cross-functional communication.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the lakehouse with Apache Iceberg on S3.
• Own ingestion end to end: Flink CDC → Kafka → Iceberg; ensure freshness.
• Manage compute/orchestration: Kyuubi on EKS, Airflow migration, autoscaling.
• Create self-service tooling so analytics engineers own pipelines.
• Close environment gaps with staging, CI, schema changes, gating.
• Own governance: Lake Formation RBAC, SSO, audit logging, PII handling.
• Own observability: Monte Carlo, lineage, alerting, SLAs.
• Champion infrastructure as code (Terraform) and GitOps.

Skills

Python

SQL

Distributed systems

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AI coding tools

Cross‑functional communication

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Prefect

Spark

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Git

Job description

Aircall is a unicorn, AI-powered customer communications platform used by 22,000+ companies worldwide to drive revenue, resolve issues faster, and scale customer-facing teams. We’re redefining customer communications by bringing voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and AI together into one seamless workspace. Our momentum comes from a simple idea: help teams work smarter, not harder. Aircall’s AI Voice Agent automates routine calls, AI Assist streamlines post-call work, and AI Assist Pro delivers real-time guidance so people can do their best work. The result is higher revenue, faster resolutions, and teams that scale with confidence. Aircall is headquartered in Paris, our European HQ, with a strong North American presence anchored in Seattle, our North American HQ, and teams across Madrid, London, Berlin, San Francisco, New York City, Sydney, and Mexico City. We’ve built a product customers love and a business that’s scaling quickly, backed by world-class investors and driven by rapid AI innovation across multiple product lines. At Aircall, you’ll join a company in motion. We’re ambitious, product-driven, and execution-focused, with visible impact, fast decisions, and real growth.

How we work at Aircall : We’re customer‑obsessed, data‑driven, and focused on delivering meaningful outcomes. We value ownership, continuous learning, and thoughtful speed. If you thrive in a collaborative, fast-moving environment where trust and impact matter, you’ll feel at home here.

About the role

Aircall's Data team is mid‑migration: we are moving off a single Redshift cluster onto an Apache Iceberg lakehouse on S3, with Flink CDC into Kafka for ingestion and dbt‑on‑Spark via Apache Kyuubi on EKS for transformation. It's a real greenfield platform build — already scoped and underway — on top of a stack that carries ten years of startup‑growth history, and all the quirks that come with it. We're building this role to give platform work the runway it deserves. Right now, our engineers wear two hats — owning the infrastructure and the business datasets running on top of it — and we're ready to invest in the high‑leverage frameworks that will make both jobs easier: data quality automation, schema registry, and staging and gated promotion. This is a dedicated platform seat: your chance to build those foundations from the ground up. Your customers are the analytics engineers, data scientists, and AI agents who build on what you ship, and your product is their leverage.

What you will do

• Build and operate the lakehouse: Apache Iceberg on S3, table design and maintenance, partitioning and compaction, and the migration of remaining Redshift workloads onto it
• Own ingestion end to end — Flink CDC → Kafka (MSK) → Iceberg, plus Rudderstack, Fivetran and DMS sources — and hold the freshness and reliability SLAs on it
• Run and evolve the compute and orchestration layer: Apache Kyuubi on EKS for dbt‑spark, Airflow (completing its ECS → EKS migration), autoscaling, spot strategy and cost efficiency
• Build the tooling, libraries and templates that let analytics engineers and data scientists own their own pipelines without filing a ticket — self‑service is the deliverable, not a side effect
• Close our environment gaps: a real staging environment, CI that tests against staging rather than production, automated schema‑change detection, gated promotion and canary deploys for critical models
• Own governance and access at the platform level: Lake Formation row/column RBAC, StrongDM zero‑trust access, SSO, audit logging, and PII handling
• Own observability: Monte Carlo, lineage, alerting and the SLAs we publish — and drive incidents to root cause and to a durable fix
• Champion infrastructure as code and automation (Terraform, GitLab CI, GitOps) across everything the team runs

What you own vs. our Analytics Engineers

You own the platform: ingestion, storage, orchestration, compute, access control, observability and the frameworks on top of them. Our Analytics Engineers own the business‑facing layer — dbt models, golden datasets, metric definitions and the semantic layer — and consume your platform as a service. You're energized by multiplying other people's speed, and drawn to problems where the end user is a fellow engineer.

Must‑haves

• 4+ years (Senior: 6+) in data engineering, data platform or infrastructure engineering
• Strong Python and SQL, with demonstrated experience building frameworks and tooling others depend on, not only pipelines
• Production experience with an orchestration framework (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) at meaningful scale — including the operational side, not just DAG authoring
• Hands‑on Apache Spark and distributed‑systems fundamentals
• Deep AWS experience (S3, EKS/ECS, IAM, Glue/Athena or equivalent)
• Comfortable building and debugging CI/CD, infrastructure as code (Terraform) and GitOps workflows; familiar with Kubernetes and Docker
• Track record owning reliability: SLAs, monitoring, alerting, on‑call, and post‑incident hardening
• Daily, hands‑on use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) as a core part of how you build and operate infrastructure
• Great cross‑functional communication — you'll shape data contracts with backend engineering and align expectations with analytics consumers

Nice‑to‑haves

• Production experience with an open table format (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and lakehouse migration off a classic warehouse
• Streaming experience: Kafka/MSK, Flink, CDC pipelines, Kinesis
• Experience with data governance tooling — Lake Formation, Unity Catalog, or equivalent RBAC/masking implementations
• Familiarity with dbt (as a platform provider — dbt‑spark, adapters, CI for dbt) and with data observability tooling such as Monte Carlo
• Experience designing platforms consumed by AI/LLM workloads and low‑latency analytics engines
• Open‑source contributions to data infrastructure projects

Base salary range: $150,000 - $200,000 USD

Why join us?

Key moment to join Aircall in terms of growth and opportunities Our peo