Staff Data Engineer

The role

You will design scalable data lakes, warehouses, and pipelines while defining data strategy and governance. You will lead data platform modernization and mentor junior engineers within a multi-disciplinary team.

What you will do

• Define data architecture and platform strategy
• Build and optimize scalable data pipelines for batch and real-time processing
• Define and enforce data governance, quality standards, and compliance frameworks
• Build monitoring, logging, and alerting for data pipelines and services
• Contribute to CI/CD workflows for data deployment and automation
• Drive data platform modernization for performance, cost, and scalability
• Use AI assistants like Claude and Cursor to ship work
• Design and implement data contracts and event flows
• Lead design and implementation of data pipelines for production AI/ML systems
• Integrate data services with APIs, middleware, and third-party systems

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of professional data engineering experience
• Experience leading complex data platform initiatives
• Strong system architecture background with expertise in distributed data systems
• Expert proficiency in Python, Scala, and SQL
• Deep expertise with cloud-native data platforms and enterprise data warehousing
• Strong expertise in data pipeline orchestration and processing
• Strong experience with streaming platforms and real-time data processing (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub)
• Strong data modeling expertise and experience with data transformation
• Strong experience with data quality, governance, and compliance frameworks
• Strong experience with container orchestration and CI/CD for data systems
• Strong experience building data pipelines for production AI/ML systems
• Demonstrated leadership and technical mentoring experience

Nice to have

• Experience with data mesh or data fabric concepts
• Lakehouse architectures
• Governance framework implementation

About the company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations. Founded in 2009, they use AWS and senior engineering talent to deliver AI into production.