Sr Data Engineer

About Us

Instrumentl is a hypergrowth YC-backed startup with over 4,000 nonprofit clients, from local homeless shelters to larger organizations like the San Diego Zoo and the University of Alaska. We are building the future of fundraising automation, helping nonprofits to discover, track, and manage grants efficiently through our SaaS platform.

About the Role

Senior Data Engineer

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help scale and evolve our data platform, which is in its early stages. You’ll play a key role in shaping the architecture, improving reliability, and building the systems that power data across the company. This is a high-impact opportunity to bring structure and scalability to an existing foundation—ideal for someone who enjoys improving systems, making architectural decisions, and driving best practices.

Responsibilities

• Design and scale our data platform including pipelines, models, and orchestration frameworks
• Develop scalable ETL/ELT pipelines for ingesting data from APIs, databases, and event streams
• Define and implement systems for data ingestion, storage, processing, and transformation
• Build and manage workflow orchestration using tools like Airflow
• Build semantic layer as well as dashboards
• Establish best practices for data modeling, testing, and quality
• Partner with stakeholders to shape data requirements and enable BI and analytics use cases
• Optimize systems for performance, scalability, and cost from day one and apply software engineering principles (testing, CI/CD, modular design) to data infrastructure

Requirements

• A min of 5+ years of software engineering experience with the last 2-3 years in data engineering, ideally including early-stage or 0→1 environments
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Advanced proficiency in SQL
• Proven experience building ETL/ELT pipelines end-to-end
• Experience with orchestration tools like Airflow
• Deep understanding of the data lifecycle: ingestion → storage → processing → transformation → serving
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Familiarity with modern data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and experience supporting BI tools (Looker, Tableau, etc.)

Nice to Have

• Experience working in startup environments
• Experience with streaming pipelines (Kafka, Kinesis)
• Exposure to ML/AI data pipelines
• Familiarity with Ruby and Rails
• Experience with data analytics and data science concepts

Compensation & Benefits

• For US-based candidates, our target salary band is $150,000 - $180,000/yr
• Salary decisions consider experience, location, and technical depth.
• 100% covered health, dental, and vision insurance for employees (50% for dependents)
• Generous PTO, including parental leave
• 401(k)
• Company laptop and home-office stipend
• Bi-Annual Company retreats for in-person collaboration