Staff Data Engineer

Overstory; San Diego (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first environment

Home office stipend

Learning budget

Competitive compensation

Flexible schedule

Job summary

Overstory is seeking a Staff Data Engineer in San Diego, CA to lead the design and scaling of the data platform that powers our AI-driven vegetation analysis. You will own the architecture and drive its evolution, collaborating with data, ML, and product engineers to balance delivery with durability and observability.

You will mentor engineers, set standards for pipelines and data quality, and help the company move toward a service-oriented architecture.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building production-grade data pipelines.
• Experience with geospatial and large-scale data processing.
• Proven leadership in cross-functional teams.
• Proficient in Dagster or similar orchestration tools.

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale the data platform for real-time and batch pipelines.
• Mentor engineers and set data quality and testing standards.
• Collaborate with data, ML, and product teams to align roadmaps.
• Lead service-oriented architecture efforts and API contracts.

Skills

Data engineering leadership

System design

Python

Communication

Mentoring

Distributed systems

Remote collaboration

Geospatial data understanding

Tools

Dagster

Airflow

Google Cloud

Pub/Sub

BigQuery

SQL

Job description

Role & Team

As a Staff Data Engineerat Overstory, you will lead the design and scaling of the data platform that enables Overstory’s AI-powered vegetation analysis. Our analysis depends on moving enormous volumes of satellite imagery, model inferences, and utility network data through orchestrated pipelines reliably, repeatably, and on time to support customer decision-making. You'll own the architecture of that platform and set the direction for how it evolves.

You'll work closely with data, ML, and product engineers, as well as product teams, to make sure the data flowing into our models and out to our customers balances pragmatic delivery with durability, traceability, and scalability. As a senior technical leader, you'll mentor other engineers, drive architectural decisions, and set standards for pipeline design, service boundaries, and data quality across Overstory.

Time zone requirement: Europe (GMT/WET, CET, EET) and Eastern North America (NST, AST, EST)

What You’ll Do

In collaboration with data, ML, and product colleagues, you will:

• Architect and evolve our orchestration layer — asset graphs, quality checks, partitioning strategies, and the patterns that keep it scaling reliably.
• Design and maintain production data pipelines for large-scale geospatial and temporal data, from ingestion through transformation to delivery.
• Lead system design work across the data platform, including service boundaries, data contracts, and designing around the failure modes that come with each.
• Drive the shift toward a service-oriented architecture, decoupling tightly bound components into services that teams can own and deploy independently.
• Build event-driven workflows, replacing brittle coupling and manual coordination with durable messaging patterns.
• Establish observability, testing, and data quality frameworks so problems surface before customers see them, allowing any result to be traced back and explained.
• Mentor engineers and define the standards for how we build, test, and operate data systems.

Skills & Experience

• Experience thriving at the intersection of data engineering, distributed systems, and large-scale scientific data; deeply motivated by the opportunity to reduce wildfire risk and improve grid resilience through better data patterns and infrastructure
• 10+ years of experience designing and building production-grade data pipelines and systems
• Deep hands-on experience with Dagster — asset-based orchestration, partitions, sensors, and the operational side of running it in production (comparable experience with Airflow, Prefect, or similar is a reasonable substitute if you're ready to go deep on Dagster)
• Proven track record building and operating data pipelines at scale, with a real feel for idempotency, backfills, and partitioning
• Experience in preparing systems to handle periods of high demand with a focus on testability and scalability best practices
• Strong system design skills — you can reason about boundaries, contracts, coupling, and failure modes, and explain the tradeoffs to people who’ll use and build on them
• Practical experience designing service-oriented architecture, including versioning and keeping things operational through migrations
• Strong Python skills and experience with Google Cloud
• Experience with Pub/Sub and event-driven patterns
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate across engineering, ML, and product
• Comfortable leading architectural discussions and mentoring other engineers
• Experience in remote-first and globally distributed team

Nice To Have

• Comfort working with geospatial data and the ways that it’s stored
• Experience building data pipelines that power ML training and inference
• Experience with analytics engineering tooling and warehouse modeling in BigQuery
• Infrastructure-as-code experience and comfort owning your systems in production
• Background in remote sensing, forestry, or the utility sector

Note: We believe that all people are capable of great things. We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the requirements that are listed within this job description.

What We Offer

• Competitive, location-specific compensation and benefits
• Flexible, autonomous and collaborative working environment rooted in trust - we build our work days around our lives, not the other way around
• Home office stipend, coworking and ongoing education budgets
• A company culture that genuinely embodies each of our core values
• To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth's natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis