Staff Data & Operations Engineer — Lead Data Platforms

RemoteStar; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

RemoteStar is seeking a Staff/Principal Data and Operations Engineer to lead the design, scalability, and reliability of core data infrastructure and operational systems. You will operate as a hands‑on builder and a strategic leader, mentoring engineers and setting technical direction across the org.

You’ll own end‑to‑end data pipelines, operational excellence practices, and collaboration with Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure to scale data platforms and tooling with the business.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or infra/ops with Staff/Principal scope.
• 4+ years in fintech.
• Deep expertise with distributed data systems (Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt) and cloud data warehousing (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
• Proficient in Python, SQL, and at least one systems language (Go/Java/Scala).

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and scale data pipelines and infrastructure supporting analytics, ML, and product use cases.
• Own operational reliability — uptime, observability, incident response, and on‑call practices for data and platform systems.
• Set technical direction and best practices for data engineering and operations across the company.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure to translate business needs into scalable solutions.
• Drive automation initiatives to reduce manual operational overhead.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership across teams.
• Lead architecture reviews, design docs, and tech decision-making for high‑impact systems.
• Identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks in data quality, pipeline performance, and operational workflows.

Skills

Python

SQL

Go/Java/Scala

Tools

Spark

Kafka

Airflow

dbt

Job description

RemoteStar is seeking a Staff/Principal Data and Operations Engineer to lead the design, scalability, and reliability of core data infrastructure and operational systems. You will operate as a hands‑on builder and a strategic leader, mentoring engineers and setting technical direction across the org.

You’ll own end‑to‑end data pipelines, operational excellence practices, and collaboration with Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure to scale data platforms and tooling with the business.