Staff Data Engineer: Lead Data Platform & AI Workloads

Cribl; United States; On-site; USD 170,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Short-term disability

Life insurance

Paid holidays

Paid time off

Fertility treatment benefit

401(k)

Equity

Job summary

Cribl, the AI-era telemetry platform company, seeks a Staff Data Engineer to lead the Data Engineering team and shape core data systems across analytics, data science, and operational decision-making. You will own Snowflake environments, orchestrations, and an evolving data tech stack, guiding architecture and best practices in a fast-growing, remote-first culture.

You will mentor engineers, drive API and data ingestion initiatives, and collaborate with stakeholders to optimize performance and

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 (or equivalent) using predictable, maintainable patterns.
• 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, with a demonstrated ability to use them to accelerate delivery.

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.
• We are a remote-first company and work happens across many time-zones – you may be required to occasionally perform duties outside your standard working hours

Skills

Snowflake

Data modeling

Python

SQL

ELT patterns

AWS

Terraform

Prefect

dbt

Tools

Prefect

Airflow

Dagster

Terraform

dbt

Job description

Cribl, the AI-era telemetry platform company, seeks a Staff Data Engineer to lead the Data Engineering team and shape core data systems across analytics, data science, and operational decision-making. You will own Snowflake environments, orchestrations, and an evolving data tech stack, guiding architecture and best practices in a fast-growing, remote-first culture.

You will mentor engineers, drive API and data ingestion initiatives, and collaborate with stakeholders to optimize performance and