Senior Data Platform Engineer

Pinecone Systems, Inc

$120K — $160K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 4+ years building and operating data pipelines in production.
  • Strong SQL skills with experience in BigQuery (or similar) for analytical queries.
  • Proficient in writing clean ETL/rETL code and consuming APIs.
  • Experience with modern orchestrators (e.g., Airflow) and containerized workloads.
  • Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure best practices.
  • Skilled in integrating systems and managing data flow between APIs and databases.
  • Hands-on experience with AI coding tools in workflow.

Responsibilities

  • Own and build the ingestion layer, designing and deploying pipelines into BigQuery.
  • Maintain the transform layer and core business datasets with focus on data quality.
  • Manage the orchestration platform and improve system reliability and observability.
  • Curate metric definitions and documentation for analysts and stakeholders.
  • Optimize infrastructure costs and performance for cloud services.
  • Lead company-level analyses and dashboards for key business decisions.
  • Empower teams by onboarding them onto the data warehouse and creating reusable models.
  • Set standards for AI-assisted data workflows.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources.
  • 401(k) Plan with company match.
  • Equity award as part of compensation.
  • Flexible time off policy for improved work-life balance.
  • Paid parental leave to support new parents.
  • Annual Company Event for team bonding.
  • WFH Equipment Stipend to enhance home office setup.
Full Job Description
About the Role

Pinecone is looking for a Senior Data Engineer to own and grow the systems that power how we understand our business. You will design and operate the ingest, transform, orchestration, and metrics layers that feed analysts, executives, and the Board, and you will lead the analyses themselves when the question matters enough. This is a high-ownership role on a small team, with direct exposure to finance, GTM, product, and the executive staff.

Responsibilities
  • Own and build the ingestion layer. Design, deploy, and scale pipelines that pull from third-party APIs, internal services, and SaaS tools into BigQuery. Add new sources as the business demands.
  • Own and build the transform layer. Develop and maintain our DBT project, including staging, intermediate, and marts. Maintain core business datasets: users, organizations, indexes, accounts, usage, revenue. Write tests, snapshots, and documentation. Drive data quality and trust.
  • Own and build the orchestration platform. Operate the Airflow-on-Kubernetes environment that runs our ingest and DBT workloads. Improve reliability, scalability, observability, and CI/CD.
  • Establish and maintain the business-context and metrics layer. Curate metric definitions and documentation that feed both human analysts and agents.
  • Manage infrastructure cost and performance. Manage BigQuery, GKE, Cloud Run, and Kafka costs, right-size compute, and make sure the platform stays efficient.
  • Lead and own mission-critical company-level analyses. Partner with finance, GTM, product, and exec stakeholders to answer business questions, design metrics, run experiments and evaluations, build views in BI tools, and ship dashboards that support key business decisions as well as regular reporting to the Board of Directors.
  • Enable other teams to self-serve. Onboard analysts and non-DE stakeholders onto the warehouse, help them with best practices, and create reusable models and tooling.
  • Set the standard for AI-assisted data workflow. Establish best AI practices and patterns that enable a small data team to operate with outsized leverage.
Qualifications
  • 4+ years building and operating data pipelines in production.
  • Strong SQL, with comfort in BigQuery (or Snowflake/Redshift) writing non-trivial analytical queries, optimizing performance, and reasoning about correctness.
  • Strong coding skills, with comfort writing ETL/rETL, consuming services and integrations against REST/GraphQL APIs, and producing clean code that others can reuse and maintain.
  • Experience with a modern orchestrator (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar) running containerized workloads.
  • Comfort with Docker, Kubernetes, and modern cloud infrastructure best practices.
  • Experience integrating systems, pulling data between APIs, databases, and warehouses; handling auth, pagination, schema drift, and incremental loads.
  • Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) as part of your workflow.
  • Ability to design, build, and own systems end-to-end in a highly autonomous environment.
Nice to Have
  • Production DBT experience: layered models, tests, snapshots, macros, deferred builds.
  • Experience working with a semantic layer, metrics layer (DBT Semantic Layer, Cube, LookML).
  • Comfortable with exploratory analysis, designing experiments and A/B tests, basic statistical modeling, and separating signal from noise in messy data.
  • Exposure to building AI agents or applications.
  • Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar).
Perks & Benefits
  • Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources
  • 401(k) Plan
  • Equity award
  • Flexible time off
  • Paid parental leave
  • Annual Company Event
  • WFH Equipment Stipend

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