Staff Data Engineer — AI Platform & Telemetry Leader

Cribl; Springfield (IL); Remote; USD 170,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision insurance

Disability and life insurance

Paid holidays and PTO

Fertility treatment benefit

401(k)

Equity

Job summary

Cribl, a remote‑first B2B SAAS data observability company, is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead Cribl’s data engineering effort. You will set direction for data systems powering analytics, data science, and operations, mentor engineers, and partner with stakeholders to shape technical strategy and architecture.

This role emphasizes Snowflake mastery, data modeling, performance tuning, and cost optimization, with responsibilities across dbt, Prefect/Airflow, and AWS infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in Snowflake: advanced data modeling, query and warehouse performance tuning, cost management, and security/RBAC design.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: experience as a tech lead or staff-level engineer setting direction, driving architecture, and delivering complex systems.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration: able to work across data, engineering, and business teams and lead through influence.
• A track record of mentoring engineers: growing junior and mid-level engineers through coaching, review, and pairing.
• Strong Python and SQL fundamentals, with solid ELT patterns and data modeling experience.
• Hands-on experience operating self-hosted / self-managed orchestration. Prefect strongly preferred; equivalent experience running Airflow/Dagster on your own infrastructure is acceptable.
• Hands-on AWS and infrastructure-as-code experience: building cloud infrastructure with Terraform.
• Experience building cloud applications or backend services: APIs, ingestion services, and event-driven workflows.
• Production-grade engineering practices: logging, alerting, versioning, CI/CD.
• Fluency building with AI-assisted development platforms such as Claude Code.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a technical lead for the Data Engineering team.
• Own architecture and design decisions for core data systems and drive reliable, production-grade outcomes.
• Partner with stakeholders across functions (Data Analysts, SREs, IT Engineers, and business teams).
• Clarify requirements, validate outputs, and communicate risks, tradeoffs, and timelines proactively.
• Own and operate our self-hosted orchestration platform.
• Run and evolve our self-managed Prefect deployment and its build/worker system.
• Own the operational hygiene, upgrade path, and cost/footprint tradeoffs of running orchestration on a hybrid, self-hosted model.
• Own Cribl’s Snowflake environment.
• Serve as the subject-matter expert on data modeling, performance, and cost optimization, and own RBAC/permissions design, permissions tooling, and governance.
• Build, operate, and monitor the core data tech stack. This covers data pipelines, ingestion services, integrations, and the warehouse, ensuring data is accurate, timely, and trusted, with logging, alerting, and observability as first-class concerns.
• Advance the modern data stack. Drive our dbt practice forward, including the in-flight dbt Fusion migration, and own warehouse cost/performance at scale.
• Develop cloud-native services and infrastructure on AWS.
• Advance our infrastructure-as-code practice (Terraform or similar).
• Build reusable modules, clean deployment patterns, CI integration, and strong operational hygiene.
• Partner with the Data Engineering manager to set technical direction.
• Mentor and grow data engineers through code review, pairing, design feedback, and coaching.
• Support Cribl’s growing data science and agentic initiatives.
• Contribute to secure, compliance-minded engineering practices in collaboration with IT/Security.

Skills

Snowflake

Python

SQL

Data modeling

AWS

Terraform

dbt

Prefect/Airflow

Leadership

Cost optimization

Tools

Prefect

Airflow

Terraform

Job description

Cribl, a remote‑first B2B SAAS data observability company, is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead Cribl’s data engineering effort. You will set direction for data systems powering analytics, data science, and operations, mentor engineers, and partner with stakeholders to shape technical strategy and architecture.

This role emphasizes Snowflake mastery, data modeling, performance tuning, and cost optimization, with responsibilities across dbt, Prefect/Airflow, and AWS infrastructure.