[Hiring] Senior Staff Data Engineer @SonderMind

Role Description

We are hiring a Senior Staff Data Engineer to play a senior technical leadership role on SonderMind’s Data Platform team. This role focuses on designing, building, and evolving the data systems that support analytics, experimentation, machine learning, and clinical outcomes across the business.

As a Senior Staff Data Engineer you will operate with a high degree of ownership and autonomy. You will be responsible for:

• Delivering reliable data infrastructure.
• Shaping technical direction and establishing best practices.
• Enabling other teams to move faster with high-quality, trusted data.
• Operating within the constraints of a regulated healthcare environment.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and maintain core data pipelines and infrastructure that power analytics, experimentation, machine learning, and AI fine-tuning across product, clinical, and operations teams.
• Own data architecture decisions related to ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving layers, focusing on scalability, reliability, cost efficiency, and maintainability.
• Establish and enforce data quality, observability, and reliability standards, including SLAs, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices for critical datasets.
• Partner closely with analytics, data science, and product engineering teams to understand data needs and translate them into well-designed, reusable data models and pipelines.
• Lead technical initiatives and drive best practices across the data engineering team, including code quality, testing, documentation, and data contracts.
• Ensure data systems meet privacy, security, and compliance requirements, with a strong understanding of handling sensitive mental health and healthcare data.
• Mentor and support other data engineers, providing technical guidance, design feedback, and helping raise the overall engineering bar.
• Support other responsibilities and ad-hoc projects as needed based on evolving business and platform needs.

What does success look like?

First 3–6 Months:

• Develop a strong understanding of SonderMind’s data landscape, key business use cases, and regulatory constraints.
• Take ownership of critical pipelines or platform components and begin making meaningful improvements to reliability and clarity.
• Build trust with analytics, data science, and engineering partners through consistent delivery and thoughtful technical decisions.

Continued Success in the Role:

• Data pipelines are reliable, observable, and well understood, with fewer surprises and faster issue resolution.
• Teams across the company are able to move faster because data is accessible, well modeled, and trusted.
• Technical decisions scale well over time and reduce long-term maintenance and operational burden.
• You influence platform direction beyond your own code by raising standards and helping others make better technical choices.

How Performance Is Measured

• Reliability and quality of core data systems, including uptime, freshness, and accuracy.
• Impact on team velocity and downstream consumers, including analytics, ML, AI, and product.
• Technical leadership and influence across the data organization.
• Alignment with SonderMind’s career competencies, including ownership, collaboration, and thoughtful problem-solving.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or backend engineering roles.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and at least one general-purpose programming language (Python strongly preferred).
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining production data pipelines at scale.
• Experience working with modern data platforms, including cloud data warehouses, orchestration tools, and transformation frameworks.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, pipeline reliability, and system design trade-offs.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally and translate business needs into effective technical solutions.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred

• Experience in healthcare, mental health, or other regulated environments.
• Familiarity with streaming or event-driven data systems.
• Experience supporting machine learning or experimentation workflows.
• Exposure to data governance, privacy, or compliance frameworks.

Benefits

• The anticipated salary range for this role is $180,000 - $200,000.
• A generous PTO policy, with a minimum of three weeks off per year.
• A holiday schedule that follows standard U.S. holidays.
• Free therapy coverage benefits to ensure employees have access to the care they need (must be enrolled in a qualifying medical plan to participate).
• Competitive Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage, with plans to meet every need — including HSA (with $1,100 company contribution) and FSA options.
• Employer-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, life & AD&D, plus coverage of the salary difference for up to seven weeks of short-term disability leave (after the required waiting period).
• Eight weeks of paid Parental Leave; if the parent also qualifies for STD, this benefit is in addition, allowing for 8–16 weeks of paid leave.
• 401(k) retirement plan with 100% match on up to 4% of base salary, immediately vested.
• Join teammates from across the country at our annual company gathering.
• Company shutdown between Christmas and New Year’s.
• Supplemental life insurance, pet insurance, commuter benefits, and more.