[Remote] Senior Data Engineer
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Apartment List is the premier rental matchmaker, connecting renters with compatible city properties. They are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to build and operate reliable, scalable data systems that support analytics and decision-making across the company.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, test, and deploy scalable and reliable data pipelines that power analytics and product decision-making
- Own medium-sized data platform initiatives end-to-end, from initial design through production deployment and operational support
- Design, migrate, and maintain data workflows in Apache Airflow, including supporting migration of legacy ETL systems to modern orchestration patterns
- Ensure pipeline reliability by proactively monitoring workflow SLAs for freshness, quality, and performance, and resolving failures efficiently
- Implement and utilize monitoring systems to detect pipeline failures, schema drift, and data quality anomalies
- Participate in on-call rotations and contribute to incident response and root cause analysis for data incidents
- Apply best practices in warehouse performance and cost optimization, including partitioning, indexing, and efficient data modeling to control BigQuery spend
- Build maintainable, modular data models and pipelines using reusable patterns and shared components across the team
- Partner closely with Analytics Engineering, Data Science, and business stakeholders to deliver durable improvements across the ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving layers of the data platform
- Contribute to operational excellence through documentation, monitoring improvements, and participation in postmortems and reliability initiatives
Skills
- 5+ years of experience in data engineering, with a track record of delivering reliable production data pipelines and systems
- Strong experience designing and maintaining orchestration workflows using Apache Airflow
- Experience building scalable data pipelines using modern cloud data platforms such as BigQuery and tools such as DBT
- Strong understanding of data modeling, schema design, and building maintainable, modular data systems
- Experience implementing CI/CD best practices for data pipelines, including automated testing, validation, and deployment workflows to ensure reliable and repeatable production releases
- Experience monitoring and operating production data systems, including pipeline observability, data quality checks, and incident response
- Ability to identify performance and cost risks in large-scale data systems and implement optimizations
- Strong collaboration skills and experience working with cross-functional partners including analytics engineers, data scientists, and product teams
- Proven ability to independently execute medium-sized projects and deliver reliable, production-grade systems
- Familiarity with Kubernetes-based data infrastructure, including deploying and operating containerized data services and workflows in a production environment
- Experience migrating legacy ETL systems to modern orchestration frameworks
- Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools for data pipelines (e.g., Datadog or similar)
- Experience operating data systems with strict SLAs for freshness, reliability, and cost efficiency
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