[Hiring] Senior Data Platform Engineer @Later

Role Description

As a Senior Data Platform Engineer at Later, you'll own the foundation our data ecosystem runs on. You'll design, build, and evolve the infrastructure, backend services, and platform capabilities that move data from source to decision, and that help engineers, analysts, and data scientists do their best work.

This is a data engineering role with a platform mindset. Our analytics platform runs on GCP and BigQuery, and our operational databases live in AWS. You'll shape how data moves between them, modernize what we have, and get our data ready for the AI-powered products we're building. You'll treat the platform as a product and the teams who depend on it as your customers.

This role is for someone who likes building the system more than the individual report or model. It isn't a traditional ETL/ELT role focused on SQL, dashboards, and pipeline maintenance, and it isn't an ML engineering or data science role. You'll build the data foundation that makes AI work, and other teams will build on top of it.

What you'll be doing

• Build, own, and evolve the data platform
• Design and own scalable infrastructure across ingestion, orchestration, storage, transformation, and consumption, including our BigQuery warehouse and lakehouse
• Make architectural decisions, explain the tradeoffs, and modernize the parts that have outgrown their original design
• Build reliable batch and real-time pipelines and dbt transformation layers
• Evolve our orchestration (GCP-native tools plus our custom orchestrator) and shape our ingestion strategy, including how we evaluate Fivetran against custom connectors
• Spot weaknesses in the platform and drive the fixes
• Mentor other engineers and raise the technical bar
• Engineer backend systems and keep them reliable
• Build the APIs, services, and integrations that move data in and out of the platform, including secure, cost-aware data movement between GCP and AWS
• Manage infrastructure as code and automate deployment with CI/CD
• Build observability, data quality checks, and access controls, and optimize performance and cost
• Create reusable tooling and standards that make the right way the easy way
• Build the foundation for AI
• Make trusted company data accessible for analytics, machine learning, and AI applications, including LLMs and AI agents
• Invest in data quality, metadata, lineage, governance, and freshness
• Design the platform to absorb new AI use cases without major rework
• Partner with AI/ML, product, and engineering teams on what they need

Qualifications

• 6+ years in data engineering, backend engineering, or platform engineering
• Track record of owning production data systems at scale and improving their reliability, performance, and cost
• Strong backend programming skills (Python or similar)
• Solid SQL and experience with dbt or a similar transformation framework
• Hands-on cloud experience, ideally GCP and BigQuery
• Comfort working across more than one cloud
• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and workflow orchestration
• Experience with batch and streaming architectures
• Working understanding of security, access control, and data governance
• The judgment to make architectural decisions and explain the tradeoffs to technical and non-technical partners

Nice to have

• Kubernetes, and experience migrating or redesigning orchestration systems
• Managed ingestion tools like Fivetran
• Experience building internal platforms or tooling that other engineers adopt
• Data foundations for AI, such as vector stores, feature pipelines, or governed LLM access

Benefits

• Market-based & data-driven approach to compensation
• Bi-annual evaluation of compensation, including performance and market-related factors
• Salary range for candidates located in the US: $125,000-205,000 USD
• Salary range for candidates located in Canada: $110,000-160,000 CAD
• All permanent team members are eligible to participate in various benefits plans

Where we work

• Offices in Boston, MA; Vancouver, BC; and Vancouver, WA
• Open to hiring fully remote candidates for select positions

Diversity, inclusion, and accessibility

At Later, we are committed to fostering a culture rooted in an inclusion-first mindset at every level of the company, embracing the importance of hiring and building teams for culture add rather than culture fit. We openly build and maintain unbiased hiring, pay, and promotion practices to create a foundation for an equitable workplace, paving the way for systemic change.

We are committed to creating a diverse environment and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, or age. Please let us know if you require any accommodations or support during the recruitment process.