[Hiring] Data Platform Engineer @Race Roster

Role Description

We are building our enterprise data platform from the ground up, and we are looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to partner directly with our Data Architect to turn a greenfield vision into an enterprise-grade reality. In this foundational role, you won't be maintaining legacy technical debt; you will be laying down the very first lines of code and infrastructure for our data ecosystem. Crucially, you recognize that data engineering is not just about building pipelines; it’s about empowering actionable storytelling. You will bridge the gap between technical ingestion and business value - ensuring we collect, structure, and model the right data to power insights for Race Roster and our customers, while keeping our cloud platform cost-efficient and lean.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering experience with a demonstrated focus on business outcomes over raw plumbing.
• Proven ability to ask "Why are we building this dataset and what actionable story does it tell?" before writing code.
• Hands-on experience managing and optimizing cloud infrastructure costs (FinOps), particularly around Snowflake warehouse sizing, query profiling, and auto-suspend configuration.
• Establish clean engineering standards around FinOps, data lineage, and data quality as foundational practices.
• Understanding load-then-transform (ELT) architectures with Snowflake.
• Advanced SQL fluency - window functions, CTEs, semi-structured data (JSON/VARIANT), and reading query profiles to diagnose and optimize slow or expensive queries.
• Strong hands-on experience with Snowflake core concepts, streaming ingestion patterns, performance tuning, and native governance features (DMFs, lineage, dynamic masking).
• Experience orchestrating and scheduling data pipelines - with Snowflake Tasks and Dynamic Tables refresh, or external tools like Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect.
• Understanding of how BI tools consume data models, with experience in Metabase or similar (Looker, Tableau, Power BI).
• Experience handling PII responsibly - masking, role-based access controls, and retention - with working knowledge of privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
• Experience ingesting data from relational databases (AWS RDS/Postgres/MySQL), AWS SQS, and REST APIs.
• Proficiency in Python, including interactive notebooks (Jupyter, marimo) and rapid frontend/dashboard frameworks (Streamlit, Gradio, etc.).
• Experience preparing structured and unstructured data pipelines for machine learning workflows or third-party computer vision/cloud AI APIs (e.g., Amazon Rekognition).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Git workflows, CI/CD automation, and containerized environments (Docker).
• Thrives in a small founding team where requirements evolve - able to work through ambiguity independently and communicate technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in software development.

Requirements

• Partner with the Data Architect to help build our greenfield medallion data architecture and data models.
• Design compute and storage architectures in Snowflake with financial discipline from Day 1.
• Build our first generation of ELT ingestion pipelines using Python frameworks like dlt.
• Build our bronze → silver → gold transformation flow as small, focused, easy-to-understand Snowflake Dynamic Tables.
• Set up Snowflake from the ground up, implementing modern features like Snowpipe Streaming and Dynamic Tables.
• Build the foundational pipelines required to feed Race Roster’s AI initiatives.
• Leverage Python notebooks and DuckDB for rapid local prototyping.
• Actively integrate AI coding assistants and LLM-powered SQL/Python generation into your daily workflow.

Benefits

• Flexible work options: remote, hybrid, or in-office.
• Opportunity to work on innovative projects in a growing company.
• Collaborative and supportive team environment.