Staff Data Engineer

Jobtailor; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor seeks a senior data engineer to own and evolve the data platform end-to-end as usage scales. You will manage Snowflake configurations, governance, and reliability while expanding source pipelines through CDC, Fivetran/Airbyte connectors, and API ingestion.

You will drive data architecture decisions, ensure governance and observability, and mentor engineers to deliver high-performance, cost-efficient pipelines in a fast-growing environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of data engineering or related field with end-to-end production data infra ownership.
• Deep Snowflake expertise including warehouse config, RBAC, cost optimization, and compute performance tuning.
• Expert SQL, dbt, and Python skills for high-performance queries and production-grade pipelines.
• Proven experience building and maintaining source pipelines including CDC via logical replication, Fivetran or Airbyte connectors, custom API ingestion, orchestration, and S3-based ingestion patterns.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the Snowflake platform end-to-end as usage scales.
• Own source pipeline reliability and expansion, evaluating connections for reliability, freshness SLAs, edge case handling, and schema drift resilience.
• Ensure data accuracy, quality, and compliance through governance, observability, and monitoring best practices.
• Own pipeline incident response with fast, root-cause analysis to prevent recurrence and clear communication.
• Improve data architecture and storage solutions to enhance performance, reduce costs, and optimize batch workflows during scaling.
• Operate as the technical authority on data infrastructure decisions and guide architectural choices.

Skills

Snowflake expertise

SQL

dbt

Python

Data pipelines

AWS infra

Mentoring engineers

ETL design

Cost optimization

PostgreSQL

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Fivetran

Airbyte

API ingestion

Orchestration (Airflow)

S3 ingestion

PostgreSQL

Job description

• Own and improve the Snowflake platform end-to-end, including the ongoing evolution of the environment as usage scales.
• Own source pipeline reliability and expansion, evaluating existing connections for reliability, freshness SLAs, edge case handling, and schema drift resilience, while building net-new integrations.
• Ensure data accuracy, quality, and compliance through governance, observability, and monitoring best practices.
• Own pipeline incident response with speed and clear communication, identifying root causes that prevent recurrence rather than just restoring service.
• Improve data architecture and storage solutions to enhance performance, reduce costs, and optimize batch workflows as usage and data volume scale.
• Operate as the technical authority on data infrastructure decisions, setting standards and guiding architectural choices that hold up as the team and the platform scale.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, database engineering, or software engineering, with experience owning production data infrastructure end-to-end.
• Deep Snowflake expertise, including warehouse configuration, RBAC and role hierarchy design, connector management, cost optimization, and performance tuning at the compute layer.
• Expert SQL, dbt, and Python skills, with experience building complex, high-performance queries and production-grade pipeline code.
• Proven experience building and maintaining source pipelines, including CDC via logical replication, Fivetran or Airbyte connector management, custom API ingestion, orchestration, and S3-based ingestion patterns.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, governance, privacy, and observability best practices.
• AWS infrastructure fluency, including RDS parameter groups, S3 bucket policies, IAM role configuration, VPC networking, and security groups.
• Preferred: Experience working across application systems and data systems, with an understanding of how they interact.
• Preferred: Experience with data platform migrations, specifically running legacy and new environments in parallel.
• Preferred: Familiarity with healthcare or other regulated data (HIPAA compliance).
• Preferred: Experience with Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Preferred: Deep PostgreSQL expertise, including query optimization, database telemetry / monitoring / maintenance, index design, and RDS-specific configuration and tuning.
• Preferred: Experience mentoring engineers and guiding cross-functional architectural decisions.

Core Competencies

Demonstrates extensive expertise in Snowflake platform management, data pipeline reliability, and data architecture optimization. Proficient in SQL, dbt, and Python for building high-performance data solutions while ensuring compliance and governance.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• Snowflake Expertise
• Expert SQL Skills
• Data Pipeline Management
• AWS Infrastructure Fluency
• Data Governance Best Practices