Senior Data Engineer
$175k - $220k • Remote • Remote - USA • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
About the job
Runpod is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to join their remote-first team. This role is crucial for building and maintaining the AI Developer Cloud platform that serves over a million developers. You will be responsible for owning data pipelines end-to-end, from ingestion to data products, utilizing technologies like Snowflake, dbt, Dagster, Terraform, and AWS. The position also involves working in an AI-forward environment, delegating tasks to and extending the capabilities of autonomous AI agents, and critically reviewing their output. This is an opportunity to shape the future of AI infrastructure for the next generation of developers.
Responsibilities
- Own the design, implementation, and operation of data pipelines end-to-end, including batch and near-real-time streaming ingestion into Snowflake, transforms in dbt, and supporting orchestration and infrastructure.
- Build well-documented, high-quality data products that are modeled, tested, and easy to understand for analytics, finance, and engineering teams.
- Ensure data quality and observability as part of every deliverable, including dbt tests, freshness and anomaly monitoring, lineage, and trustworthy alerting.
- Diagnose and optimize warehouse cost and performance, verifying changes with measurement.
- Independently debug production data incidents, including root-cause analysis, blast radius assessment, fixing, and verifying downstream impact.
- Manage infrastructure as code (Terraform for AWS and Snowflake) with a 'merge is deploy' discipline.
- Work daily with AI agents, delegating work, verifying AI-assisted output, and contributing to agent effectiveness through skills and documentation.
- Partner cross-functionally to translate business questions into data requirements and build maintained systems.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years focused on data engineering in modern cloud environments.
- Strong Python and advanced SQL skills, with a focus on tested, reviewed, and maintainable code.
- Hands-on depth in a modern MPP/OLAP warehouse or query engine, including query profiling, clustering, partitioning, cost attribution, and performance tuning (Snowflake preferred; Trino, ClickHouse, Spark, BigQuery, or similar also acceptable).
- Experience building and operating orchestrated pipelines (Dagster, Airflow, or similar) and analytics engineering with dbt or equivalent.
- Proven track record of owning systems in production, including monitoring, incident response, and follow-through.
- Demonstrated ability to use AI tools to improve work speed and quality, with critical evaluation and verification of AI-assisted output.
- Excellent written communication skills for clear documentation and decision propagation in a distributed team.
- Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform preferred) and comfort operating in AWS.
- Experience with streaming or near-real-time ingestion (Kinesis, Kafka, Snowpipe Streaming, or similar).
- Experience building with LLMs or agent frameworks (tool use, orchestration, evaluation).
- Startup experience, including comfort with ambiguity, breadth, and shipping MVPs.
Benefits
- Competitive base pay ranging from $175,000 - $220,000 USD
- Meaningful equity in a fast-growing company
- Flexible PTO
- Remote work first with inclusive, collaborative teams
- Opportunity to work on the cutting edge of AI infrastructure
- $1,200 Home Office & Equipment Stipend