Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Apartment List is a company focused on enhancing the rental experience, and they are seeking a Senior Data Engineer II to own the architecture of their data platform. The role involves end-to-end pipeline design, making architectural decisions, and collaborating with various teams to ensure the platform's reliability and scalability.
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve data pipeline architecture across core domains — ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving — making project-level architectural decisions independently and evaluating tradeoffs between freshness, cost, scalability, and simplicity
- Lead the design and implementation of platform-level improvements: warehouse cost management, compute efficiency, and access control architecture, treating reliability, observability, and cost efficiency as core design constraints rather than afterthoughts
- Identify and lead technical initiatives that improve the platform's long-term health — proactively surfacing investments (orchestration, CI/CD, data access, developer experience) before they become blockers, and making the case for them
- Drive large, technically complex projects or multiple concurrent medium-sized initiatives that span teams, taking responsibility for outcomes rather than just execution
- Lead monitoring and testing strategy for your domain: proactively close observability gaps across the org, build alerting ahead of failures, and serve as the go-to engineer for the hardest production issues
- Influence technical decisions and architectural direction beyond the Data & Analytics team, partnering directly with EPD stakeholders on infrastructure decisions that affect their roadmaps
- Actively mentor other data engineers and analytics engineers, reviewing architectural and modeling decisions, and operate as a technical peer to senior engineers across teams
- Integrate AI meaningfully into data engineering workflows — building tooling and automation that creates leverage for the whole team, not just individual output, and coaching others on effective, validated use
Skills
- 7+ years of data engineering experience, including a demonstrated track record of owning end-to-end pipeline architecture, not just implementing to spec
- Deep experience designing orchestration workflows in Apache Airflow, including making architectural tradeoffs across ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving layers
- Experience working with containerized data infrastructure in production, including deploying services, diagnosing operational issues, and contributing to platform reliability and scalability
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate and communicate architectural tradeoffs (freshness vs. cost, scalability vs. simplicity) to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience building or significantly improving CI/CD practices for data pipelines, including automated testing, validation, and deployment
- A track record of leading incident response and monitoring strategy for a domain, including building alerting and observability ahead of failures rather than reacting to them
- Experience influencing technical decisions across multiple teams or functions, including partnering with engineering, product, or data science stakeholders outside your immediate team
- Experience mentoring other data engineers, including reviewing architectural and modeling decisions
- Experience with Kubernetes-based data infrastructure
- Experience leading a legacy ETL-to-modern-orchestration migration end-to-end, not just contributing to one
- Familiarity with observability and monitoring tooling such as Datadog at a platform-wide scale
- Experience building internal tooling or automation (including AI-assisted) that other engineers rely on
Company Overview
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