Excellent opportunity to join a well-funded, VC backed startup in the San Francisco Bay Area as the Founding Principal Data Engineer. This role offers a career-defining opportunity for ambitious data engineers to accelerate their growth and contribute to a quickly evolving startup. You’ll be joining an in-person team of engineers and physicists to continue to build and commercialize a first of its kind modern platform for battery science that battery teams can use to innovate, securely at scale. Labs use this platform to analyze data from thousands of parallel experiments and unlock previously hidden insights connecting battery design to performance. This platform currently operates in battery labs across three continents and their reach is growing rapidly. This position offers strong equity (diluted), competitive compensation, excellent benefits, career development opportunities, and outstanding work environment.

Role Responsibilities

In this role you will:

• Take ownership of the data architecture, data pipeline and ETL codebase, and the security, performance, scalability, and reliability of the data platform and the data pipelines on the web app.
• Take responsibility for the overall technical execution of the product roadmap, working closely with the CEO and founders.
• Build, test and ship software to manage, operate and improve the data pipelines and the associated cloud infrastructure.
• Take ownership for success of technical integrations.

Technical qualifications

This is a comprehensive and versatile position within the data engineering field. The ideal candidate is one with experience in roles that have incorporated modern data engineering and data pipelining tasks with elements of DevOps and/or SRE, Machine Learning, and full-stack development. You must be excited to do hand-on coding and technical work but equally enjoy leading engineering teams to peak performance. This role will initially be 90% IC, 10% management.

Must-have

BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

3+ years of hands-on data engineering experience with high ownership of data pipeline and ETL code base, including current or previous experience leading an engineering team and driving timely delivery of product requirements.

Experience leading data engineering at a seed stage / Series A / Series B startup.

Well versed in:

• ETL processes, data modelling, and data engineering best practices (PySpark / AWS EMR experience preferred)
• Containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, AWS EKS, and/or AWS Fargate to deploy and manage scalable data solutions.
• Cloud platforms AWS, Azure, and/or GCP.
• CI/CD tools (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI) to automate data pipeline deployments and automate the integration and deployment of code changes
• Infrastructure as code (Helm, Terraform, CloudFormation) to define and manage data infrastructure through code, ensuring consistency and scalability.
• Time series data and tools such as PostgreSQL, Druid, Timescale DB, and Influx DB.

Nice-to-have

Hands on experience in DevOps and/or SRE or leading such teams is a plus.

Expertise in monitoring tools (Prometheus, Open Telemetry, ELK Stack) and strong scripting skills in Bash or Python essential for maintaining and automating data workflows, ensuring system reliability and troubleshooting issues.

Understanding of integrating machine learning models into data workflows to extract meaningful insights and adding advanced scalability to data engineering tasks.

Experience with our client’s tech stack:

• Postgres database with data indexing using Elasticsearch for efficient data retrieval and search capabilities
• Modern python based ETL with a node.js / next.js GraphQL layer for building scalable and efficient data pipelines
• React TypeScript front-end
• Hosted in AWS with Kubernetes

Personal Attributes

You are a good fit if:

• You are a hands-on leader. You’re excited to do hand-on technical work but equally enjoy leading engineering teams to peak performance.
• You are a team player. You understand the importance collaboration, humility, and effective communication. You take actions to help your colleagues, and you want to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
• You take strong ownership. You like owning problems end-to-end, and you are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. You are not afraid to communicate what is working and what needs to improve.
• You’re ambitious and you want to move fast. You want to accelerate your trajectory and have an outsized impact on a rapidly growing VC-backed startup. You set an exceptionally high-performance bar for yourself and everyone on the team.

Submit your resume today!