Data and Operations Engineer — Staff/Principal Lead
Full-time | San Francisco (In-Office)
Visa Sponsorship: Not available
About the Role
Looking for a Staff/Principal-level Data and Operations Engineer to lead the design, scalability, and reliability of our core data infrastructure and operational systems. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who can operate as both a hands-on builder and a force multiplier — setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and partnering closely with cross-functional teams to ensure our data platforms and operational tooling scale with the business.
You'll own critical systems end-to-end: from data pipeline architecture to operational excellence practices (monitoring, incident response, automation), and you'll be a key voice in shaping engineering standards across the org.
What You'll Do
- Architect, build, and scale data pipelines and infrastructure supporting analytics, ML, and product use cases
- Own operational reliability — uptime, observability, incident response, and on-call practices for data and platform systems
- Set technical direction and best practices for data engineering and operations across the company
- Partner with Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure teams to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions
- Drive automation initiatives to reduce manual operational overhead
- Mentor and provide technical leadership to engineers at all levels; act as a force multiplier across teams
- Lead architecture reviews, design docs, and technical decision-making for high-impact systems
- Identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks in data quality, pipeline performance, and operational workflows
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure/operations roles, with demonstrated Staff/Principal-level scope
- 4+ years in fintech
- Deep expertise in distributed data systems (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt) and cloud data warehousing (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift)
- Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, and at least one systems language (Go, Java, or Scala)
- Proven experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform)
- Track record of leading large-scale technical initiatives with cross-functional stakeholders
- Strong operational mindset — experience with observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus), incident management, and building resilient systems
- Excellent communication skills and experience mentoring senior engineers
- Comfortable operating with high autonomy and ambiguity in a fast-paced environment