Staff Software Engineer, Data Engineering

Unchain Data; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 208,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Professional development budget

Competitive salary and benefits

Generous vacation policy

Catered lunches and snacks

Job summary

Unchain Data is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical direction for the Data Engineering team. You will oversee the architecture of the Caspian Data Platform, focusing on ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality.

The ideal candidate has 10+ years of data engineering experience and deep mastery of Databricks. This position offers a competitive salary range of $208,000 - $260,000, plus benefits in a collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering with hands-on experience.
• Deep mastery of Databricks and platform-level decisions.
• Proven ownership of data quality and governance.

Responsibilities

• Lead design of core data platform components.
• Define engineering patterns for Databricks pipelines.
• Establish benchmarks for data quality and governance.

Skills

Data platform architecture

Databricks

SQL

Python

AWS

Job description

The Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Data Engineering team, you set the technical direction for the Caspian Data Platform — Ripple's centralized lakehouse powering analytics, financial reporting, product intelligence, and data‑driven operations across every business unit. You own the architecture for ingestion, transformation, governance, and data quality across the platform, and you stay deep in the code while you do it. You are the bar raiser for the team: the engineer who sets the standard for how data is built at Ripple, and the others learn from working alongside you.

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.

Requirements

• 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 — with the judgment to make platform‑level decisions and the skill to implement them.
• 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.

Compensation

For positions that will be based in CA, the annual salary range for this position is $208,000 USD - $260,000 USD. Actual salaries may vary based on numerous factors including, among other things, an individual applicant's experience and qualifications for the position. This range does not include equity or additional compensation, such as bonuses or commissions.

Benefits

Do Your Best Work

• The opportunity to build in a fast‑paced start‑up environment with experienced industry leaders
• A learning environment where you can dive deep into the latest technologies and make an impact. A professional development budget to support other modes of learning.
• Thrive in an environment where no matter what race, ethnicity, gender, origin, or culture you identify with, every employee is a respected, valued, and empowered part of the team.
• In‑office collaboration for moments that matter is important to our culture, and we give managers and teams the flexibility to decide which 10+ days a month they come in.
• Bi‑weekly all‑company meeting - business updates and ask me anything style discussion with our Leadership Team
• We come together for moments that matter which include team offsites, team bonding activities, happy hours and more!

Take Control of Your Finances

• Competitive salary, bonuses, and equity
• Competitive benefits that cover physical and mental healthcare, retirement, family forming, and family support
• Employee giving match
• Mobile phone stipend

Take Care of Yourself

• R&R days so you can rest and recharge
• Generous wellness reimbursement and weekly onsite & virtual programming
• Generous vacation policy - work with your manager to take time off when you need it
• Industry‑leading parental leave policies. Family planning benefits.
• Catered lunches, fully stocked kitchens with premium snacks/beverages, and plenty of fun events

Benefits listed above are for full‑time employees.