Staff Data Engineer (Remote) — GRC Data Platform

Workiva, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 149,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)

401(k) match

Comprehensive employee benefits

Job summary

Workiva is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to own Postgres schema design and the extraction layer powering our GRC data products. You will lead transactional models, BI marts, and history marts, partnering with an OLAP specialist to drive end-to-end data outcomes from source to analytics.

This is a hands-on role focused on reliability, governance, and scalable data practices. You will mentor engineers, define data contracts, and collaborate on platform infrastructure while maintaining strict

Qualifications

• 5+ years in data engineering or backend engineering with hands-on ownership of production Postgres systems.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, review, and evolve Postgres schemas for GRC product services, balancing normalization, query performance, and application ergonomics.
• Set standards for indexing, constraints, partitioning, and connection pooling; identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in production.
• Own migration strategy and tooling (schema changes, backfills, zero-downtime deploys) across services.
• Own change-data-capture and extraction: what leaves Postgres, in what shape, on what cadence, and how upstream schema changes are communicated before they break downstream models.
• Define the data contract at the landing zone with the OLAP specialist so extraction output is stable and well-documented; you own upstream reliability, they own what happens after landing.
• Where dbt/ETL logic sits closer to source-of-truth semantics, collaborate with the OLAP specialist to determine ownership on a per-project basis, documented explicitly rather than left implicit.
• Establish relational modeling patterns and review standards so engineers build consistent, maintainable schemas.
• Optimize SQL for transactional workloads (query plans, indexing strategy, lock contention, multi-join performance at scale).
• Define data contracts between services so schema changes don't silently break consumers, including downstream OLAP consumers.
• Implement data integrity checks, replication/failover practices, and monitoring for transactional data health and extraction pipelines.
• Work within regulated release pipelines using GitOps/CI/CD; manage schema and pipeline promotions through dev/test/prod with gated approvals.
• Apply RBAC, audit logging, and encryption standards aligned with Workiva's information-protection policies, at the OLTP layer and extraction layer specifically.
• Establish schema design patterns, SQL coding standards, and documentation so engineers can confidently build against Postgres without escalating every decision.
• Mentor engineers on relational modeling, query optimization and transactional system fundamentals; lead incident resolution and root-cause analysis for production data issues, including extraction failures.
• Partner with the OLAP specialist to define and document where responsibility splits, and revisit that boundary as the platform matures.
• Partner with the platform data team on infrastructure decisions (warehouse provisioning, streaming infra, CI/CD tooling) while retaining ownership of GRC-specific schema design, modeling standards and data quality outcomes; this team owns the 'what and how' of GRC data models, platform data team owns the 'on what infrastructure.'

Skills

SQL expert-level

CDC pipelines

dbt knowledge

Mentoring engineers

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/Data Eng

Tools

PostgreSQL

PgBouncer

Data modeling

Job description

Workiva is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to own Postgres schema design and the extraction layer powering our GRC data products. You will lead transactional models, BI marts, and history marts, partnering with an OLAP specialist to drive end-to-end data outcomes from source to analytics.

This is a hands-on role focused on reliability, governance, and scalable data practices. You will mentor engineers, define data contracts, and collaborate on platform infrastructure while maintaining strict