Senior Data Engineer

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to be a foundational, greenfield hire and build our analytical data platform from the ground up on modern cloud infrastructure. While we run a production Postgres database, we do not yet have a dedicated analytical data platform—and that is the heart of this role.

You will design and build our data foundation, turning it into the trusted core that powers our agentic AI on two distinct fronts:

• Internal AI Agents: Creating curated, governed company data that our internal agent systems can reason over reliably.

• Customer-Facing AI Features: Building the modeled data pipelines and feature stores behind the predictive and prescriptive insights shown on customer dashboards.

You are an expert data engineer who genuinely understands how modern LLM agents consume data, embeddings, and feature stores. In this role, you will completely own the data and retrieval layer, partnering closely with our Senior Agentic Systems Engineer who builds the orchestration and agent logic on top of it.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the Analytics Platform (Greenfield): Design and build our first analytical data platform on cloud infrastructure (warehouse, ingestion, transformation, and orchestration).

• Develop the AI Data Layer: Build and maintain the retrieval substrate, embeddings pipelines, and vector storage (RAG data plumbing) to keep internal and external agents grounded in fresh, accurate data.

• Construct Data Pipelines: Build reliable ELT/CDC pipelines from production Postgres and backend services using cloud-native streaming/ingestion tooling and dbt for transformation.

• Model Data for AI & Analytics: Create dimensional models and a documented semantic/metrics layer to serve dashboards, data analysts, and internal AI agents with unified definitions.

• Establish Orchestration & CI/CD: Set up workflows using a modern orchestrator (Airflow, Dagster, or Cloud Composer), alongside data CI/CD environments and automated testing.

• Own Governance & Compliance: Implement data validation, lineage, observability, and PII controls appropriate for sensitive financial, donor, payments, and cross-border tax data.

• Collaborate Across Teams: Partner with the AI Systems Engineer and backend team to instrument product events and ship customer-facing insights.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of Data Engineering experience, including at least one greenfield warehouse/platform build you owned end-to-end.

• Demonstrable LLM & AI Data expertise: Proven track record of building embeddings pipelines, managing vector databases (e.g., pgvector, Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate, Vertex AI Vector Search), and architecting RAG data plumbing or feature stores that feed production AI/LLM systems.

• Deep understanding of how AI agents consume data, including data retrieval strategies, context window management, semantic search optimization, and grounding LLMs in structured enterprise data.

• Expert SQL and deep PostgreSQL experience, alongside strong hands-on expertise with major cloud data warehouses (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or Databricks).

• Proficient in Python for building scalable data pipelines, custom ML/AI data tooling, and integrations.

• Strong ELT/ETL design using dbt and modern orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect).

• Hands-on experience with modern cloud data infrastructure across major providers (GCP, AWS, or Azure data services, object storage, and event streaming/messaging queues).

• Strong grasp of data governance: Enterprise-grade data quality, lineage, observability, and strict PII controls suitable for financial and sensitive domain data.

Desirable Pluses:

• Direct experience building data layers that production LLM agents depend on.

• Experience with Streaming / Change Data Capture (CDC) at scale and near-real-time serving.

• Experience with ML feature engineering, MLOps, or cloud AI ecosystems.

• Familiarity ingesting data from backend APIs (.NET/Go/Python) and tracking events from React/React Native clients.

• A background in Fintech, payments, or the charitable-giving/nonprofit domain.