Senior Data & Ops Engineer — Lead, Scale & Reliability

RemoteStar; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

RemoteStar in San Francisco seeks a Staff/Principal Data and Operations Engineer to lead the design, scalability, and reliability of core data infrastructure and operational systems. This senior role combines hands-on building with technical leadership and cross-team collaboration to scale data platforms for the business.

You will own end-to-end data pipelines, monitoring, incident response, and automation, partnering with Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure to shape engineering standards

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or infra/operations roles with Staff/Principal-level scope.
• 4+ years in fintech.
• Deep expertise in distributed data systems (Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt) and cloud data warehousing (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
• Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, and at least one systems language (Go, Java, or Scala).
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Track record of leading large-scale technical initiatives with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strong operational mindset with observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus) and incident management.
• Excellent communication skills and mentoring experience for senior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and scale data pipelines and infrastructure supporting analytics, ML, and product use cases.
• Own operational reliability — uptime, observability, incident response, and on-call practices for data and platform systems.
• Set technical direction and best practices for data engineering and operations across the company.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure teams to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Drive automation initiatives to reduce manual operational overhead.
• Mentor and provide technical leadership to engineers at all levels; act as a force multiplier across teams.
• Lead architecture reviews, design docs, and technical decision-making for high-impact systems.
• Identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks in data quality, pipeline performance, and operational workflows.

Job description

RemoteStar in San Francisco seeks a Staff/Principal Data and Operations Engineer to lead the design, scalability, and reliability of core data infrastructure and operational systems. This senior role combines hands-on building with technical leadership and cross-team collaboration to scale data platforms for the business.

You will own end-to-end data pipelines, monitoring, incident response, and automation, partnering with Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure to shape engineering standards