Staff Data Platform Engineer — Real-Time Analytics & AI

Vercel Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 232,000 - 348,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Mentorship & events

Flexible time off

WFH budget

Job summary

Vercel is seeking a Staff level Engineer to lead the design and development of a next-generation Data Platform. Architect a foundational system powering data across products and business, supporting real-time analytics and AI initiatives.

You will define the technical vision, mentor engineers, and ensure high availability with modern tech like Kafka, ClickHouse, Tinybird, and Snowflake. Reporting to the Senior Director of Data Engineering, this role shapes data strategy across the organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data engineering or data architecture.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale data infrastructures.
• Experience with Kafka and its ecosystem (e.g., Kafka Streams, Confluent).
• Strong cloud and data governance/security knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement a next-gen data platform supporting batch and real-time workloads.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and leadership to align data strategy with business goals.
• Define data ingestion, modeling, ETL, and warehousing with ClickHouse/Tinybird/Snowflake to enable low-latency analytics.
• Lead and mentor engineers to drive architectural excellence and innovation.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, and Legal to ensure data protection and availability.
• Drive roadmap decisions, evaluate build-vs-buy options, and scale the data platform for growth.
• Collaborate with data scientists and ML teams to support analytics and AI initiatives.
• Serve as key decision-maker for data architectures and technologies aligned with business objectives.

Skills

Data engineering

Data architecture

Kafka

Snowflake

ClickHouse

Tinybird

Cloud platforms

Leadership

Mentoring

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

Kafka

Confluent Platform

ClickHouse

Tinybird

Snowflake

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Vercel is seeking a Staff level Engineer to lead the design and development of a next-generation Data Platform. Architect a foundational system powering data across products and business, supporting real-time analytics and AI initiatives.

You will define the technical vision, mentor engineers, and ensure high availability with modern tech like Kafka, ClickHouse, Tinybird, and Snowflake. Reporting to the Senior Director of Data Engineering, this role shapes data strategy across the organization.