The Role

Pilot is hiring a Senior Analytics Engineer to own our data foundation: the warehouse, the semantic layer, and the ingestion that every team at Pilot runs on.

As the Senior Analytics Engineer on this team, you'll own that foundation end-to-end. You'll architect the warehouse and the semantic layer, bring new data sources online as the business expands, and operate it like a well-oiled production system. The work you ship is the foundation every team at Pilot reports, decides, and forecasts against. You own how Pilot's data is shaped, modeled, and surfaced for AI tools, so every team can integrate AI into their workflows safely and reliably.

This is a strong fit for someone who strives to enable and empower others, brings a critical eye to processes and looks for opportunities to automate and streamline them, has clear opinions about what good data foundations look like, and treats AI-coding tools as a default part of how they build.

Pilot's data stack is Snowflake, dbt, and Looker, with Fivetran and Airflow for ingestion and Fivetran Activations (formerly Census) for reverse-ETL. We use Claude Code or Cursor with governed MCP servers (Looker, dbt, Snowflake) as part of our day-to-day workflow.

Location: San Francisco, CA (3 days/week in office - Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays).

Key Responsibilities

• Architect Pilot's data foundation: the warehouse layout, the semantic layer, and the access patterns that let humans and AI agents use Pilot's data safely and well
• Methodically plan what each domain's data needs to look like, then ship it as durable, well-documented, well-tested models in dbt
• Lead the ingestion of new data sources as the business expands: scope what's needed, choose the right pattern (Fivetran, custom Airflow DAG, or partner share), and ship it production-grade with tests and docs
• Keep the foundation reliable and clean: operate it as a production system and continuously retire what's stale
• Build AI tools and workflows that uplevel the data team's own work (Claude Code skills, MCP-driven agents)
• Enable other teams to safely AI-enable their own workflows on Pilot data. For example, scope governed access surfaces, build the patterns that route them to the semantic layer first, and partner on intake review for new Claude Project integrations
• Set the technical standards: testing, documentation, naming, materialization, deprecation, code review
• Own Pilot's canonical metrics across the company (including Finance, Sales, Operations, and Marketing)

About you

Requirements:

Even if you don't have experience with the specific technologies in our stack, we'd love to talk to you!

• 5+ years experience as an Analytics Engineer or Data Engineer with end-to-end ownership of a production warehouse and modeling layer
• A track record of architecting data platforms that other teams build on
• Strong SQL and production dbt experience at meaningful scale, including layered architecture, tests, documentation, and CI
• Snowflake or comparable cloud data warehouse experience
• Experience with a semantic layer (LookML, dbt Semantic Layer, Cube, MetricFlow, or comparable)
• Experience streamlining data processes with AI dev tools, and building AI workflows or agents that teammates use day-to-day
• Working Python proficiency for ingestion code (extending or writing Airflow DAGs, building custom connectors), plus hands-on experience with managed ingestion (Fivetran or comparable) and reverse-ETL (Census or comparable)

Working Style

• Cares about driving a company-wide data-driven culture through easy data access and self-service
• Drives to find new tools and ways of working, and spreads them to uplevel the team
• Takes pride in end-to-end ownership. Cares about how the platform looks and works, with a point of view about where it should go

Nice to Have

• Experience setting up safe, audited AI access to a data warehouse (allow-listed schemas, audit logs, kill switches)
• Experience designing data platforms that non-data teams build self-serve workflows on top of
• Airflow production experience
• dbt Cloud experience
• Looker administration experience (permissions, content curation, Spectacles, LAMS)
• Data observability experience (Elementary, Monte Carlo, or comparable)
• Fintech, accounting software, or B2B SaaS data background

The base pay range target for the role seniority described in this job description is $166,000 - $224,000 in San Francisco, CA. Final offer amounts depend on multiple factors such as candidate experience and expertise, geographic location, total compensation, and market data. In addition to cash pay, full-time regular positions are eligible for equity, 401(k), health benefits, and other benefits; some of these benefits may be available for part-time or temporary positions.