Staff Data Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to be the technical backbone of our Data organization. You will be part of the team owning the architecture of our data platform and making sure our data is ready for the AI era. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role: you will spend most of your time designing and building, not managing people.

• Own the technical vision and architecture of Clara's data platform, from ingestion and storage to modeling, serving and consumption
• Design and build scalable, reliable, cost-efficient data pipelines (batch and streaming) that support analytics, machine learning and operational use cases
• Lead our AI enablement efforts: structure, document and expose data (semantic layers, curated datasets, metadata, feature stores, retrieval-ready data) so that people, models and AI agents across the company can use it safely and effectively
• Define and drive best practices in data modeling, testing, observability, CI/CD, lineage and data quality
• Partner with the Director of Data to translate business and strategic goals into technical roadmaps, and to evaluate build-vs-buy decisions
• Implement the technical foundations of our data governance strategy: access control, PII handling, auditability and compliance, which matter in a regulated fintech environment
• Advance our self-service data platform so analysts, data scientists and business teams can work autonomously
• Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, Risk, Growth, Marketing and Operations to ensure data is captured correctly at the source
• Raise the technical bar of the team through code reviews, design reviews, mentoring and technical documentation, without formal people-management responsibilities
• Stretch and adapt to a dynamic and fast-paced work environment
• 10+ years of experience in data engineering or software engineering with a data focus, including significant experience building and scaling data platforms at a top-tier tech company (fintech/startup experience is a plus)
• Proven track record designing and operating production-grade data architectures (lakehouse/warehouse, ELT/ETL, orchestration, streaming) at scale
• Deep proficiency in SQL and Python; experience with distributed processing frameworks (e.g. Spark) and orchestration tools (e.g. Airflow, Dagster)
• Experience building tooling for AI agents or LLM applications on top of enterprise data (text-to-SQL, MCP, RAG pipelines)
• Hands-on experience preparing data for ML and AI use cases (feature engineering, vector stores/embeddings, semantic layers, LLM-ready data) or a clear track record of moving quickly into this space
• Strong experience with cloud data platforms and infrastructure (AWS, GCP or Azure), plus infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD practices
• Strong command of data modeling, data quality, observability and governance best practices
• Experience with modern data stack tools (e.g. dbt, Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Kafka)
• Ability to make sound architectural trade-offs (scalability, cost, reliability, speed of delivery) and communicate them clearly to technical and non-technical audiences
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills; comfortable influencing without authority and working closely with a Director-level leader
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or another relevant quantitative discipline (or equivalent practical experience)
• Experience in payments, credit, cards or other regulated financial services
• Experience with data catalogs, metadata management and data contracts
• Open-source contributions or technical writing/speaking

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