Senior Data Platform Engineer — Remote AI Data Pipelines

Handshake; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity ownership

401(k) match

Parental/fertility benefits

Medical, dental, & vision coverage

Wellbeing stipend

Learning stipend

Hybrid: SF office perks

Flexible PTO

Team outings & referral bonuses

Job summary

Handshake is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to build and operate the data infrastructure that powers our career marketplace and AI products. You will own the systems orchestrating batch workloads, delivering trustworthy data to engineers and product teams, while shaping the data infrastructure strategy.

You will lead the workflow orchestration platform, data ingestion, data pipelines, and our data warehouse in a collaborative, high-velocity environment; involvement with AI development

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience building and operating production data or distributed systems.
• Deep hands-on Airflow experience beyond writing DAGs: scheduling and execution behavior, deployment, scaling, upgrades, monitoring, and debugging failures.
• Experience with event-driven or streaming data infrastructure, including a message broker or managed event bus and a stream processing system.
• Sound understanding of CDC, delivery guarantees, idempotency, ordering, schema evolution, and recovery or replay in production pipelines.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code; comfortable working with containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, access controls, and production observability.
• A track record of leading ambiguous infrastructure initiatives: setting technical direction, making pragmatic architecture tradeoffs, and driving adoption across teams.
• Clear communication and a track record of partnering across teams while owning systems through production support.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction and roadmap for our Airflow and Astronomer platform while owning its production operations: deployment, DAG packaging, scheduler and worker capacity, upgrades, observability, and incident response.
• Build paved paths for authoring, testing, deploying, and operating workflows, including reusable operators, CI checks, local and staging environments, and clear runbooks.
• Design and operate streaming and change data capture pipelines using tools such as Pub/Sub, Dataflow or Beam, and Datastream to serve analytics and product use cases.
• Make data delivery resilient to retries, duplicates, schema changes, late events, backfills, and replay; define useful latency, freshness, and reliability targets.
• Improve the cloud foundation behind data workloads with Kubernetes, Terraform, IAM, secrets, CI/CD, and cost-aware capacity management.
• Lead cross-team design decisions on data contracts, interfaces, and operational ownership; mentor engineers and align application, analytics, ML, and cloud partners on scalable platform approaches.
• Participate in on-call, troubleshoot production failures across systems, and turn incidents into durable improvements.
• Build dependable data and orchestration foundations for AI workloads, including batch inference, evaluation datasets, and agent-facing data.

Skills

Python

Airflow

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Leadership

Communication

Tools

Pub/Sub

Dataflow

Datastream

BigQuery

GKE

Terraform

Spacelift

Datadog

dbt

Job description

Handshake is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to build and operate the data infrastructure that powers our career marketplace and AI products. You will own the systems orchestrating batch workloads, delivering trustworthy data to engineers and product teams, while shaping the data infrastructure strategy.

You will lead the workflow orchestration platform, data ingestion, data pipelines, and our data warehouse in a collaborative, high-velocity environment; involvement with AI development