Senior Data Platform Engineer — Architecture Lead (Remote)

Apartment List, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 210,000 - 255,000; Full time

Job summary

Apartment List, Inc. is hiring a Senior Data Engineer II (IC4) to own end-to-end data pipeline architecture for ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving within a remote US role.

You will influence analytics, data science, and engineering partners while shipping hands-on code and guiding platform evolution. The role emphasizes architectural decisions, reliability, observability, and cost efficiency, with mentorship of other engineers and the opportunity to embed AI tooling into data

Qualifications

• 7+ years of data engineering experience with end-to-end pipeline ownership.
• Deep experience designing orchestrations in Apache Airflow and tradeoffs across layers.
• Experience with containerized data infra, deployment, and production reliability.
• Ability to communicate architectural tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience building or improving CI/CD for data pipelines with automated testing.
• Track record leading incident response and observability initiatives.
• Experience influencing decisions across multiple teams (engineering, product, data science).
• Experience mentoring other data engineers.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve data pipeline architecture across core domains — ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving — making project-level architectural decisions independently and evaluating tradeoffs between freshness, cost, scalability, and simplicity.
• Lead the design and implementation of platform-level improvements: warehouse cost management, compute efficiency, and access control architecture, treating reliability, observability, and cost efficiency as core design constraints rather than afterthoughts.
• Identify and lead technical initiatives that improve the platform's long-term health — proactively surfacing investments (orchestration, CI/CD, data access, developer experience) before they become blockers, and making the case for them.
• Drive large, technically complex projects or multiple concurrent medium-sized initiatives that span teams, taking responsibility for outcomes rather than just execution.
• Lead monitoring and testing strategy for your domain: proactively close observability gaps across the org, build alerting ahead of failures, and serve as the go-to engineer for the hardest production issues.
• Influence technical decisions and architectural direction beyond the Data & Analytics team, partnering directly with EPD stakeholders on infrastructure decisions that affect their roadmaps.
• Actively mentor other data engineers and analytics engineers, reviewing architectural and modeling decisions, and operate as a technical peer to senior engineers across teams.
• Integrate AI meaningfully into data engineering workflows — building tooling and automation that creates leverage for the whole team, not just individual output, and coaching others on effective, validated use.

Skills

Data engineering

Airflow

CI/CD for data

Observability

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Platform reliability

AI tooling

Tools

Kubernetes

Datadog

Job description

Apartment List, Inc. is hiring a Senior Data Engineer II (IC4) to own end-to-end data pipeline architecture for ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving within a remote US role.

You will influence analytics, data science, and engineering partners while shipping hands-on code and guiding platform evolution. The role emphasizes architectural decisions, reliability, observability, and cost efficiency, with mentorship of other engineers and the opportunity to embed AI tooling into data