Staff Software Engineer, Data & Inference

Primer; Mission (KS); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited vacation

Generous parental leave

Professional development support

Annual team offsite

Job summary

A cutting-edge tech startup in Kansas is seeking an experienced data engineering lead to design and scale its data platform. The role involves building reliable, scalable data pipelines from diverse APIs and ensuring high uptime. Candidates should have 6+ years of experience in data systems, expert SQL and Python skills, and a proactive mindset. This position offers competitive benefits and the chance to work in a collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building and scaling production-grade data systems.
• Hands-on experience with Spark/Flink/Kafka.
• Familiarity with columnar databases like DuckDB and Clickhouse.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship scalable batch + streaming pipelines.
• Own reliability and cost of data pipelines.
• Scale integrations with third-party APIs.

Skills

Expert SQL

Strong Python

Distributed data technology experience

Leadership experience in data teams

Concurrency and parallelization understanding

Education

BS/MS in CS/CE/EE or similar

Tools

Kubernetes

Airflow/Dagster/Prefect

dbt

Job description

This role is in-person in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are looking for A-players who want to work on groundbreaking technology, love to collaborate in person, and we’re willing to pay for it. This person should expect to spend most days in our office close to Embarcadero station.

OVERVIEW

Our product lets users join together disparate datasets, connect siloed marketing and sales SaaS tools and construct automated “playbooks” for customer acquisition. The orchestration of these playbooks is complex and can only be done by mastering scalable APIs, ETLs, Reverse ETLs, distributed systems, and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). We work with a modern technology stack (React/Node, Python) as well as cutting edge data technologies such as Prefect and dbt . Our systems processes terabytes daily and aim to provide sub-second response times to our customers’ queries and make batch processing behave like real-time.

After bootstrapping our way to almost $1M in revenue in our first year, Craft Ventures swooped in to lead Seed and Series A rounds as we continued to demonstrate consistent 15-20% MoM growth. Early team members of Carta, Okta, Figma, Masterclass, Segment, Pilot.com, People.AI, and Skyhigh have also joined our investor network.

We are a small and dedicated, distributed team (~20 people), working on making advanced data infrastructure developed at large tech companies accessible to marketing and sales teams around the world. If you are fascinated by the software that powers large technology companies such as Dropbox, but want the challenges and freedom that come with working in a small startup, then a working at Primer might be just the thing for you!

Your Mission

Lead the design, delivery, and scaling of Primer’s end-to-end data platform—owning the full lifecycle from ingestion to insights to make data reliable, fast, and useful across the company. You’ll turn diverse, third-party APIs and heterogeneous sources into trusted, low-latency pipelines; uphold data quality and SLAs; and amplify impact by spreading best practices and data-driven thinking across teams.

What you’ll do

• Be a force multiplier: design and ship scalable batch + streaming pipelines; prototype, profile, and harden critical paths. Code review, mentor, and raise the overall bar.
• Own reliability, cost, and SLOs: instrument observability and capacity; drive ≥99.9% uptime, minutes-level latency, and cost/TB efficiency; lead RCAs and land durable fixes.
• Operate pragmatic inference pipelines that augment data flows (enrichment, scoring, QA with LLMs/RAG); manage versioning, canarying, caching, and evaluation loops.
• Partner cross-functionally to build “data as a product” a la Netflix : define audience and contracts, ensure reliability and ownership, manage lifecycle (versioning→sunsetting), and validate impact through usage.
• Drive pipeline and data lake architecture: run design reviews, document trade-offs/lineage/reversibility, and make clear build‑vs‑buy calls others can safely build on.
• Scale integrations with third‑party APIs and internal services; resolve data conflicts, ensure quality, and support both sub‑second query paths and large batch workflows.

What you’ll need

• 6+ years building and scaling production‑grade data systems, with a track record in data architecture, modeling, and pipeline design. Leadership experience on data engineering/platform teams.
• Expert SQL (query optimization on large datasets) and strong Python; hands‑on with distributed data tech (e.g., Spark/Flink/Kafka) and modern orchestration (Airflow/Dagster/Prefect).
• Experience building and maintaining integrations and data services; solid understanding of concurrency/parallelization and classical processing patterns.
• Familiarity with dbt, columnar databases (DuckDB, Clickhouse), and the modern data stack; IaC, CI/CD, and observability fundamentals. (Kubernetes exposure is a plus.)
• BS/MS in CS/CE/EE (or similar) with strong fundamentals; excellent async communication in distributed teams.
• Bonus: Very good Node.js skills, which will help you onboard quickly.

You’ll succeed by having

• A founder‑level bias for action: turn bottlenecks into automated workflows; ship fast, iterate, and measure outcomes.
• Deep empathy for data consumers (analysts, product, business stakeholders) and a pragmatic approach that balances speed, cost, and accuracy for business impact.
• Proactive, honest communication; comfort working hybrid in‑person and with a distributed team; ability to set high standards and operate beyond your comfort zone.
• A default‑to‑teach ethos—mentoring others, documenting schemas/lineage/trade‑offs—and the judgment to choose build vs. buy wisely; acts as a clear, calm proxy for data/infra decisions.

What’s in it for you?

• Be part of a different sort of unicorn: an early stage startup focused on profitability with demonstrated, consistent revenue growth (15‑20% MoM growth).
• Stand out from the pack. Primer’s engineering team is world class and our patent‑pending technology sets it apart from the rest of the GTM space, including areas like real‑time data, graphics, inference, and AI recommendations. Real innovation happens here.
• Feel trusted. Our engineers choose how they manage their time and spend >90% of it outside of meetings. We value outcomes above all else.
• Get founder experience without having to write investor pitches. Keith (CEO) and Juan (CTO) have a proven track record inside of startups (Y‑Combinator , Wheelhouse , Modsy , Eden ) as well as combined decades of industry experience from places like BlackRock and Dropbox . This role will partner closely with founders and let you see how the sausage is made.
• Our culture is high‑achieving, genuinely kind, and collaborative.

BENEFITS

• AI subscriptions (Cursor, Claude Code, and monthly subscription to frontier model)
• Unlimited vacation: required 5 weeks paid time off.
• Generous parental and family leave.
• New equipment and office stipend of $1,500.
• Support for personal and professional development outside of work.
• Annual team offsite.
• Diverse and fun team.

What is the interview process like?

We pride ourselves on being respectful of your time. Our interview process starts with an introductory call with one of our founders, followed by a take home exercise, then a half‑day session to meet our team. We typically provide a decision within 24‑48 hours from the last meeting and aim to conclude the whole process within a week, provided that it works with your schedule.

What do I do now?

If this sounds like an interesting opportunity, please apply by email at [e-mail] , and include your LinkedIn profile, CV, Github repos, or anything else that you think might give us a good sense of who you are.