Staff Data Engineer: Lead Data Platform & AI Infra

Cribl; Atlanta (GA); Remote; USD 170,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

401(k) with match

Equity

Paid holidays

Paid time off

Fertility treatment benefit

Job summary

Cribl is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead and design the data engineering platform. You will drive architecture for core data systems, own the Snowflake environment, and oversee self-hosted orchestration and cost optimization.

Expect hands-on work with Prefect, dbt, Terraform and AWS, plus mentoring and cross-functional collaboration. This remote-first role offers a competitive salary and equity.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in Snowflake with modeling, performance, cost control and RBAC design.
• Technical leadership experience as tech lead or staff engineer.
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration and communication.
• Mentoring of junior and mid-level engineers.
• Strong Python/SQL, ELT patterns, and data modeling experience.
• Hands-on experience with self-hosted orchestration (Prefect preferred).

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. This includes our ingest/API services (event-driven ingestion, upsert patterns, package reuse) and the IaC that supports them.
• Advance our infrastructure-as-code practice (Terraform or similar).
• Build reusable modules, clean deployment patterns, CI integration, and strong operational hygiene, including self-hosted/hybrid deployment patterns.
• Partner with the Data Engineering manager to set technical direction.
• Shape the platform roadmap, engineering standards, and build-vs-buy/architectural tradeoffs.
• Mentor and grow data engineers through code review, pairing, design feedback, and coaching that levels up junior and mid-level engineers.
• Support Cribl's growing data science and agentic initiatives.
• Prepare model-ready datasets, expose features, and integrate AI/LLM workflows into production.
• Contribute to secure, compliance-minded engineering practices in collaboration with IT/Security.

Skills

Snowflake

Python

SQL

Data modeling

Cost optimization

Leadership

Mentoring

Tools

Prefect

Airflow

Dagster

dbt

Terraform

AWS

Job description

Cribl is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead and design the data engineering platform. You will drive architecture for core data systems, own the Snowflake environment, and oversee self-hosted orchestration and cost optimization.

Expect hands-on work with Prefect, dbt, Terraform and AWS, plus mentoring and cross-functional collaboration. This remote-first role offers a competitive salary and equity.