Staff Data Platform Engineer

Faire; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 247,000 - 339,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Faire is seeking a Staff Engineer to own the data plumbing that moves data from production databases into analytical stores. You will design the next generation data movement, build CDC/streaming ingestion into Kafka and Iceberg on S3, and guide analysts and data scientists.

This is a hands-on role where you’ll set direction, ship pipelines, lead migrations, and mentor engineers as we mature our lakehouse architecture with Iceberg, Snowflake, Databricks, and Spark on AWS.

Qualifications

• Deep experience with CDC and streaming ingestion from operational databases through Kafka.
• Open table format Iceberg on S3; talk about partitioning, compaction, catalogs, copy-on-write vs merge-on-read.
• Strong Spark skills; experience with Databricks and Snowflake against shared storage.
• Data quality and observability using tools like Anomalo or Monte Carlo.
• Airflow at scale and managed ingestion like Fivetran.
• Strong SQL and data modeling; Python and at least one of Kotlin/Java/Scala/Go; AWS with Terraform.
• Data governance concepts: access control, retention, lineage, and audit.
• Proven track record leading cross-team data initiatives and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for how data moves from production systems into analytical stores and own the roadmap.
• Build the CDC and streaming ingestion layer: CockroachDB to Kafka to Iceberg on S3 with proper ordering and deduplication.
• Implement data contracts and quality checks throughout the platform.
• Apply data governance and SLAs; integrate observability tools to surface data issues early.
• Run Airflow and Fivetran effectively; decide what to build vs buy.
• Own reliability: SLOs, on‑call, incident reviews, and follow‑through to prevent repeats.
• Lead migration of existing pipelines to the new platform without breaking dependencies.
• Mentor engineers to elevate the team's data engineering practice.

Skills

Change data capture

Streaming ingestion

Spark

SQL

Python

Kotlin/Java/Scala/Go

Terraform

AWS

Leadership

Mentoring

Tools

Kafka

Fivetran

Airflow

Iceberg

S3

Snowflake

Databricks

Spark

CockroachDB

MySQL

DynamoDB

Job description

Faire is seeking a Staff Engineer to own the data plumbing that moves data from production databases into analytical stores. You will design the next generation data movement, build CDC/streaming ingestion into Kafka and Iceberg on S3, and guide analysts and data scientists.

This is a hands-on role where you’ll set direction, ship pipelines, lead migrations, and mentor engineers as we mature our lakehouse architecture with Iceberg, Snowflake, Databricks, and Spark on AWS.