Staff Data Engineer

Strategic Employment Partners (SEP); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Top-tier benefits

Job summary

Strategic Employment Partners in San Francisco is helping a rapidly growing startup scale its data infrastructure. We are seeking a senior data engineering leader to own and evolve the production data platform powering the organization.

You will architect a high-availability data platform and mentor engineers across cross-functional partners. You will own end-to-end pipelines with tools like Airflow in cloud environments (AWS/GCP/Azure), set enterprise data models, and drive governance and

Qualifications

• 7+ years in data engineering with solid software fundamentals.
• Experience building ETL systems and reusable components.
• Fluency with pipeline orchestration tools and cloud platforms.

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale a high-availability data platform for multiple teams.
• Establish enterprise data models and a unified data layer.
• Own end-to-end pipelines using orchestration tools in cloud environments.
• Improve tooling and infrastructure to accelerate delivery.
• Partner with engineering leadership to shape the data roadmap.
• Coach junior engineers and raise technical standards.
• Define data governance and security controls across the platform.

Skills

Data Engineering

Software Development

ETL

Airflow

Communication

Spark

Cloud Platforms

Tools

Airflow

Prefect

Dagster

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

A venture-backed startup in San Francisco is scaling rapidly and investing heavily in the data infrastructure that powers its core business operations. With strong growth momentum and an ambitious technical roadmap, they're looking for a senior data engineering leader to own and evolve the platform that the entire organization runs on.

In this role, you'll architect and scale a production-grade data platform - spanning orchestration, infrastructure, data modeling, and governance - while serving as a technical anchor for cross-functional partners and a mentor to a growing engineering team.

Salary: $200-230k (DOE) + Equity + Top Tier Benefits

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale a high-availability data platform serving teams across the organization including Product, Engineering, Data Science, Marketing, and Finance
• Establish and steward enterprise-wide data models across core business domains, creating a unified and consistent data layer.
• Own end-to-end pipeline orchestration using tools like Airflow in cloud-native environments
• Continuously evaluate and improve internal tooling and infrastructure to reduce operational burden and accelerate team output
• Partner with engineering leadership to shape the long-term data roadmap and drive prioritization
• Coach and develop junior engineers, raising the technical bar across the team
• Define and uphold data governance standards and security controls across the platform

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years in a data engineering capacity with a strong foundation in software development principles
• Demonstrated experience architecting ETL systems and reusable framework components
• Fluency with pipeline orchestration platforms such as Airflow, Prefect, or Dagster
• Practical experience deploying and managing workloads across AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Comfort with modern infrastructure tooling including Terraform and Kubernetes
• Clear, confident communicator across both technical and business audiences
• Experience with Spark or comparable distributed processing frameworks a plus