Staff Data Engineer - AI-Powered Data Platform Leader

Robots & Pencils; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

AWS Certification preferred

Job summary

Robots & Pencils in Seattle is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to join a multi-disciplinary engineering team building modern, enterprise-grade data platforms. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who can define data strategy, own platform decisions end-to-end, and contribute to technical leadership across the team.

You will design scalable data lakes, warehouses, and pipelines, define governance and quality standards, and drive data platform modernization while mentoring junior engineers

Qualifications

• 7 years of professional data engineering experience.
• Strong system architecture background with distributed data systems.
• Proficiency in Python, Scala, and SQL.
• Deep expertise with cloud-native data platforms and enterprise data warehousing.
• Strong experience with data pipeline orchestration and processing.
• Experience with streaming platforms (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).
• Strong data modeling, data quality, governance, and compliance experience.
• Experience with container orchestration and CI/CD for data systems.
• Experience building data pipelines for production AI/ML systems (embeddings, vector stores, feature stores).
• Leadership and mentoring across teams.

Responsibilities

• Define data architecture and platform strategy across pipelines, warehouses, and data lakes.
• Build and optimize scalable data pipelines for batch and real-time processing.
• Define and enforce data governance, quality standards, and compliance frameworks.
• Build monitoring, logging, and alerting for data pipelines; contribute to CI/CD for data deployment.
• Drive data platform modernization for performance, cost, and scalability.
• Apply AI-forward mindset with tools like Claude and Cursor to accelerate delivery.
• Collaborate with backend, platform, and engineering teams on data contracts and event flows.
• Lead design and implementation of data pipelines for production AI/ML systems.

Skills

Python

Scala

SQL

Distributed systems

Data modeling

Data governance

CI/CD

Docker

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

Kafka

Kinesis

Airflow

Terraform

AWS

Job description

Robots & Pencils in Seattle is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to join a multi-disciplinary engineering team building modern, enterprise-grade data platforms. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who can define data strategy, own platform decisions end-to-end, and contribute to technical leadership across the team.

You will design scalable data lakes, warehouses, and pipelines, define governance and quality standards, and drive data platform modernization while mentoring junior engineers