Sr. Data Engineer

Thirdwaveautomation; Union City (CA); On-site; USD 131,000 - 216,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401k matching

Flexible schedule

Meals provided

Stock/equity

Job summary

Third Wave Automation is seeking a Data Engineer to architect and optimize the data truth across autonomous fleet products. You will work with real-world, messy data from diverse customer environments and build models that predict outcomes while challenging existing KPIs.

You will partner with Engineering, Product, and Customer Success to deliver dashboards, reports, and scalable data pipelines. A strong emphasis on AI-powered insights and narrative storytelling will drive strategic decisions.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to think from the ground up with a focus on why and how data is used.
• 7+ years of experience using advanced statistical techniques on complex datasets.
• Proficiency in SQL, Python, or JavaScript and experience with data warehouses and analytics tools.
• Strong database design mindset and data modeling skills.
• Experience deploying AI agents and automated workflows to expand analytics reach.
• Excellent presentation skills and ability to influence executives and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Engineer and critique data ingestion pipelines; validate data sources used for performance reporting.
• Partner with Engineering and Product to inform requirements and influence roadmaps.
• Collaborate with Customer Success to provide tools and reporting that demonstrate value.
• Create visualizations that translate complex data into clear narratives for internal and external stakeholders.
• Champion generative AI tools to automate mundane tasks and derive actionable insights.

Skills

First-Principles Thinking

Statistical Fluency

Technical Mastery

Database Architect Mindset

AI-Enabled Scale

Master Storyteller

Tools

BigQuery

Looker

Grafana

BigTable

dbt

Snowflake

Job description

Company Description

Third Wave Automation is a rapidly growing startup that has demonstrated its core technology components, proven its market fit, and just closed its Series C funding. If you are excited about cutting edge machine learning, robotics that affects the real world, and want to join a company where your skills can have a huge impact, you’ll fit right in.

Third Wave Automation is applying modern machine learning to materials handling—delivering site‑specific forklift navigation and infrastructure‑free pallet handling that continuously adapts to changing floor configuration and warehouse demand.

Job Description

Most data roles are about maintaining what already exists. This isn’t one of them.

As our dedicated Data Engineer, you aren't just joining a team; you are the architect of our data truth. We operate autonomous products in complex, unpredictable customer environments. This generates "messy" real‑world data that defies standard templates. We need a skeptic and a creator—someone who looks at a dashboard and asks, "What are we missing?" and then builds the model to find it.

How You Can Make an Impact

You will have the autonomy to tear down existing models and build new ways to measure the performance of our autonomous fleet products in the real world.

• Challenge the Status Quo: Audit and evolve our organizational KPIs. If a metric isn't driving a decision, you’ll be the one to kill it and propose a better way to measure success.
• Deep‑Dive Discovery: Go beyond the surface. Perform deep‑dive exploratory analysis to find the "hidden" signals in our autonomous product data that others might overlook.
• Model Innovation: Design and implement novel data models that don't just track what happened, but leverage simulation models to predict what will happen next in our customer environments.
• Architecture Influence: Influence the design and support the documentation of the overall data structures to support the evolving needs of the organization.

What You'll Do (Your First 90 Days and Beyond)

• Engineer the Pipeline: Provide critical feedback on our data ingestion pipelines and validate the data sources used for performance reporting.
• Partner for Growth: Build strong partnerships with Engineering and Product teams to inform solution requirements and influence the roadmap based on your findings.
• Empower Customers: Work with our Customer Success team to provide tools and reporting that give our customers a clear view into the value we provide.
• Visualize the Future: Create compelling visualizations for both internal and external consumption that translate complex data clusters into a clear narrative.
• Scale with an AI‑First Mindset: Champion the use of generative AI tools (e.g., Gemini, Cursor) to automate the mundane and generate quality insights.

Qualifications

• First‑Principles Thinking: You should be more interested in the "why" than the "how" and have a demonstrated ability to think from the ground up.
• Statistical Fluency: 7+ years of experience using advanced statistical techniques to analyze custom, non‑linear data sets.
• Technical Mastery: Proficiency in SQL, Python, or Javascript, with deep experience in data warehouses and analytics tools (BigQuery, Looker, Grafana, BigTable preferred).
• Database Architect Mindset: Technical proficiency in database design development, data models, and techniques for data mining and segmentation.
• AI‑Enabled Scale: Beyond traditional analysis, you have an appetite for deploying AI agents and automated workflows to expand our alerting surface area. You see AI not as a buzzword, but as a tool to bridge the gap between massive datasets and actionable insights.
• Master Storyteller: Excellent presentation skills with the ability to influence executives and engineering leads by turning data into a compelling story.

Preferred

• Zero‑to‑One Experience: Proven track record of being the first data hire or building a data function from scratch in a startup environment. You know how to choose the right tech stack (BigQuery, Snowflake, dbt) without a pre‑existing manual.
• Domain Expertise in Physical Tech: Prior experience in Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, IoT, or Industrial Automation. You understand the unique pain points of "hardware‑meeting‑software" data (e.g., latency, sensor noise, edge cases).
• The "Analytics Engineer" Layer: Deep experience with dbt (data build tool) or similar framework for transforming raw data into clean, documented, and tested modeling layers.
• Product‑Led Growth Mindset: Experience working directly with Product Managers to build Product‑Led Growth (PLG) funnels or using data to influence product feature prioritization.
• Advanced Statistical Modeling: Ability to go beyond descriptive statistics into predictive modeling (e.g., using Python/R for churn prediction, anomaly detection in robot performance, or regression analysis).
• Visual Design Aesthetic: A high bar for "Data Design." You don't just build charts; you build intuitive, executive‑ready interfaces that tell a story at a glance.
• Cloud Architecture Literacy: Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (GCP/AWS) and how data flows from a physical device (the forklift) to the cloud and finally into the warehouse.

The pay range for this position is $131,000 - $216,000/yr+ benefits+equity; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job‑related knowledge, skills, and experience. Base pay information is based on market location.

More About Working Here

Core Values

• Safety. We consider safety in everything we do.
• People. We care about our teammates as people.
• Encouragement. We encourage teaching, asking questions, and sharing opinions.
• Transparency. We are transparent and sincere in our actions.

Benefits and Perks

• Comprehensive benefits. Health, Dental, Vision, and a 401k matching program, to boot!
• Flexible working schedule. Be productive when you work best.
• Show & Tell. We love to learn from one another, and see the cool stuff everyone is working on!
• Meals are covered. Lunch is provided every day, and dinner for those evenings that run long.
• Stacks of snacks. Donuts are a main food group, and the snack shelf is always stocked with a wide variety of items.
• Great teammates. One of the best parts of working here!

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We value each person's expertise and experiences. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

All qualified applicants able to work in the United States are encouraged to apply. We are unable to sponsor H‑1 visas subject to fees required by the ‘Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers’ Presidential Proclamation dated September 21, 2025.