Senior Data Platform Engineer - Architecture & Scale

Apartment List; United States; Remote; USD 154,000 - 182,000; Full time

Job summary

Apartment List is seeking a Senior Data Engineer II to own the data platform architecture, with end-to-end pipeline design and independent architectural decisions. You will shape how Analytics Engineering, Data Science, and Engineering partners build on the platform and mentor other data engineers across teams.

You’ll work hands-on, shipping pipelines, debugging production issues, and driving platform improvements that balance reliability, cost, and scalability.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of data engineering experience with end-to-end pipeline ownership.
• Deep experience designing Airflow orchestration workflows across stages.
• Experience with containerized data infrastructure in production.
• Ability to evaluate and communicate architectural tradeoffs to stakeholders.
• Experience building/improving CI/CD for data pipelines.
• Leadership in incident response and monitoring strategy for a domain.
• Influences technical decisions across multiple teams.
• Mentors other data engineers and analytics engineers.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve data pipeline architecture across core domains, balancing freshness, cost, and scalability.
• Design platform-level improvements: cost management, compute efficiency, and access control.
• Lead technical initiatives to improve platform health (orchestration, CI/CD, data access).
• Drive large, complex projects spanning teams with clear ownership of outcomes.
• Lead monitoring and testing strategy; close observability gaps and pre-empt failures.
• Influence architectural direction with EPD stakeholders on infrastructure roadmaps.
• Mentor data/analytics engineers and review architectural decisions.
• Integrate AI into data workflows with tooling and automation.

Skills

End-to-end pipeline architecture

Apache Airflow

Containerized data infra

Architectural tradeoffs communication

CI/CD for data pipelines

Incident response & monitoring

Cross-team influence

Mentoring data engineers

Job description

Apartment List is seeking a Senior Data Engineer II to own the data platform architecture, with end-to-end pipeline design and independent architectural decisions. You will shape how Analytics Engineering, Data Science, and Engineering partners build on the platform and mentor other data engineers across teams.

You’ll work hands-on, shipping pipelines, debugging production issues, and driving platform improvements that balance reliability, cost, and scalability.