Staff Data Platform Engineer — Lakehouse & AI

Hidden Road; United States; Hybrid; USD 212,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bi-weekly all-company meeting

Catered lunches, fully-stocked kitchen

Professional development budget

Job summary

Ripple is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Data Engineering team to set the technical direction for the Caspian Data Platform. You will own ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality across the platform, remaining deeply hands-on while raising the bar for the team.

You will lead architecture decisions for production-grade Databricks pipelines, establish data quality benchmarks, and guide cross-team initiatives. Strong focus on AI integration and code quality.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of data engineering experience, with a strong track record of architecting and operating data platforms at scale, while remaining deeply hands-on.
• Deep mastery of Databricks — Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and Spark.
• Demonstrated ownership of ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality across a production platform.
• Expert in SQL and Python, applied to complex data modeling, transformation, and platform tooling.
• Strong AWS experience operating data systems at scale.
• A history of being the technical bar raiser — setting standards and patterns that other engineers build on, and lifting the quality of everyone around you.
• Experience driving AI tooling into data engineering workflows — building agentic systems, integrating LLMs into developer workflows, or enabling conversational analytics.
• The ability to influence through technical credibility and translate tradeoffs for both engineers and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of the core pillars of the platform — ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality — and build the most critical components yourself.
• Define the engineering patterns and reference architectures for Databricks pipelines, and stay hands-on shipping production flows, writing the reference implementations, and prototyping the hard parts before the team scales them.
• Establish the benchmark for data quality and governance — expectations, data contracts, lineage, validation frameworks — and hold the team to it through building and code review.
• Lead the most complex, ambiguous initiatives that span multiple quarters and teams, from problem statement to delivered capability.
• Lead the technical direction for applying AI across data engineering. This includes agentic systems for pipeline operations, automated transformation generation, and self-serve analytics interfaces. Develop the first versions yourself.
• Act as the quality standard bearer: raise code quality, build rigor, and engineering judgment across the team, and mentor senior engineers into greater ownership.

Skills

Databricks

SQL

Python

AWS

Data platforms

Tools

Delta Live Tables

Unity Catalog

Delta Lake

Spark

Job description

Ripple is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Data Engineering team to set the technical direction for the Caspian Data Platform. You will own ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality across the platform, remaining deeply hands-on while raising the bar for the team.

You will lead architecture decisions for production-grade Databricks pipelines, establish data quality benchmarks, and guide cross-team initiatives. Strong focus on AI integration and code quality.