[Hiring] Staff Data Engineer @Machinify

Role Description

As a Staff Data Engineer on the Migrations team, you are the end-to-end technical and operational owner of client migrations. You will drive the full lifecycle, from deep-dive legacy analysis to production deployment, while orchestrating collaboration across Operations, Client Success, Product, Data Science, and Platform Engineering. You don't just implement; you own the outcome.

This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role for someone who can think like an architect, execute like a senior engineer, and coordinate like a program manager — all on the same project. You'll own the problem space from discovery to go-live, making the defining architectural decisions and writing the code that brings them to life.

What You’ll Do

• Lead discovery & technical due diligence — get to the bottom of poorly documented legacy systems (ETL, stored procedures, reporting layers, file feeds), reconstruct the business logic, and capture it in the lineage maps, mapping specs, and risk analyses everyone builds from.
• Reverse-engineer complex legacy systems using agents — you will be responsible for reverse-engineering complex, undocumented legacy systems (SSIS packages, stored procedures) where business logic is embedded, not documented.
• Drive ambiguity to resolution — spot the unknowns early, own the open questions, and pull answers from clients, SMEs, and Operations instead of waiting to be unblocked.
• Architect & build the migration pipelines — turn intricate legacy logic into production-grade Airflow DAGs and Spark jobs on the Machinify platform.
• Make and document the hard architectural calls — own the decisions that matter (pipeline design, partitioning strategy, validation approach) and leave a clear trail of the reasoning.
• Prove correctness at scale — build automated reconciliation frameworks that confirm, with confidence, that migrated output matches the source down to the row.
• Own the program end to end — be the single technical owner from kickoff through go-live and hypercare.
• Raise the bar for the practice — institutionalize migration knowledge by codifying runbooks and retrospectives, mentor L3/L4 engineers, and turn recurring migration pain points into scalable, reusable tooling.

Qualifications

• 8+ years as a hands-on Data Engineer or Software Engineer, with demonstrated experience independently owning complex, multi-stakeholder technical projects from start to finish.
• Strong Python and SQL — fluent with complex, unfamiliar legacy code, not just greenfield work.
• Apache Spark — deep understanding of distributed processing, performance tuning, partitioning, and debugging at scale.
• Apache Airflow — advanced; comfortable designing and authoring production DAG architectures from scratch.
• AI-assisted development — actively uses coding agents (Claude, Copilot, Cursor, or equivalent) as a force multiplier in daily engineering work.
• Legacy ETL stack — able to reconstruct intent from code and translate it faithfully into a modern stack.
• Data validation & reconciliation at scale — experience designing automated frameworks that prove migrated data matches source systems with high confidence.
• AWS — proficient with S3, solid grasp of cloud-native data patterns.
• Cross-functional coordination — proven ability to drive alignment across engineering, operations, and client-facing teams simultaneously.
• Clear technical communication — able to write discovery specs, architecture docs, and stakeholder updates that are accurate, concise, and actionable.
• Data-first mindset & fidelity — a rigorous, data-first mindset, with deep experience in building automated reconciliation frameworks.

Benefits

• Work from anywhere in the US! Machinify is digital-first.
• Full Medical/Dental/Vision for employees & their families.
• Flexible and trusting environment where you’ll feel empowered to do your best work.
• Unlimited FTO.
• Competitive salary, equity, 401(k) including employer match.
• The base salary range for this role is $230k-$260k.

Equal Employment Opportunity at Machinify

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.