Software Engineer, Data Systems

Gamma
San Francisco, CA, United States
3 days ago
Apply on www.careerbuilder.com
Prepare application

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Experience level
Expert
Experience required
10 years minimum
Compensation
$230,000.0 - $310,000.0
Working hours
Regular working hours

Tech stack

Query Performance Data Analysis Systems Engineering Software as a Service Information Engineering Data Governance Data Infrastructure Decision Support Systems Distributed Data Store Distributed Systems PostgreSQL Performance Tuning
+10 more
Software Engineering Data Streaming Systems Architecture Snowflake Reliability of Systems Change Data Capture Star Schema Apache Kafka Terraform Stream Processing

Job description

You’ll own Gamma’s data infrastructure and architecture as we scale to hundreds of millions of users and petabytes of data. This means defining the technical strategy for our end-to-end event pipeline architecture, designing distributed systems that handle massive scale with reliability, and establishing the foundation for how data flows through Gamma. You’ll solve the hardest data engineering challenges we face while setting the technical direction for data infrastructure across the company.

As a Staff Data Engineer, you’ll balance hands-on engineering with technical leadership. You’ll architect solutions for orders of magnitude growth, mentor engineers across the organization, and drive strategic decisions about our data stack. You’ll work closely with analytics, product, and engineering leadership to enable data-driven decision making at scale while building systems that serve millions of users and inform critical business decisions.

Our team has a strong in-office culture and works in person 4-5 days per week in San Francisco. We love working together to stay creative and connected, with flexibility to work from home when focus matters most.

What you’ll do

  • Own and evolve our end-to-end event pipeline architecture, from Kafka ingestion through Snowflake analytics, setting technical direction for data infrastructure
  • Design and architect distributed data systems that scale to orders of magnitude more data volume while maintaining world-class query performance
  • Lead initiatives to build and optimize CDC (change data capture) pipelines and streaming data transformations at massive scale
  • Establish best practices for data quality, pipeline reliability, and system observability across the organization
  • Drive strategic technical decisions about data modeling, infrastructure architecture, and technology choices
  • Mentor engineers and elevate data engineering practices across analytics, product, and engineering teams

Requirements

  • 10+ years as a data or software engineer with deep expertise in distributed systems, data infrastructure, and high-growth SaaS products at massive scale
  • Expert-level knowledge of Apache Kafka (producers, consumers, Kafka Connect, stream processing) and event streaming platforms
  • Extensive hands-on experience with Snowflake, including performance optimization, cost management, and data modeling; strong foundation in Postgres, CDC patterns, and replication strategies
  • Proven track record architecting and leading major data infrastructure initiatives through orders-of-magnitude growth
  • Experience establishing best practices and driving technical strategy across organizations
  • Strong communication skills with a history of influencing technical direction across engineering, analytics, and leadership
  • Proficiency with dbt, Terraform, and working knowledge of data governance, privacy compliance (GDPR, CCPA), and security best practices, Apache Kafka, Architectural Design, Best Practices, Building Systems, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Communication Skills, Cost Control, Data Collection, Data Modeling, Data Quality, Distributed Computing, Leadership, Mentoring, Performance Tuning/Optimization, PostgreSQL, Product Engineering, Replication and Remote Mirroring, Snowflake Schema, Software Engineering, Software as a Service (SaaS), System Architecture, Systems Engineering, Systems Reliability, Technical Leadership, Technical Strategy

Benefits & conditions

The base salary for this full-time position, which spans multiple internal levels depending on qualifications, ranges between $230K - $310K plus benefits & equity.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including but not limited to experience and expertise in the requirements listed above.

Apply for this position

This job is hosted externally. Click below to view the full posting and apply.

Apply on www.careerbuilder.com
Prepare application

Good distractions

Talks and stories from around this role — technically off-topic, practically not.

1:34 min

Essential commands for running and testing Terraform configurations

Hennie Francis · LIVE

1:33 min

Integrating internal APIs and maintaining data sovereignty

Mahran Meißner Mahran Meißner · World Congress 2026 Europe

5:37 min

Extensibility and programmability features of the PostgreSQL database

Silvano Coriani Silvano Coriani · Europe 2026 Virtual

2:14 min

Solving complex platform architecture challenges at an enterprise scale

Maria Apazoglou · Coffee With Developers

2:32 min

Overview of Terraform and Terraform Cloud features

Devlin Duldulao · LIVE

3:03 min

Career evolution in data engineering and AI platforms

Maria Apazoglou · Coffee With Developers

Videos

See all

Related articles

See all