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# Data Engineer

- **Company:** Lightning AI
- **Location:** New York, NY, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $188,000.0 - $275,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Customer Data Management, Information Engineering, Data Governance, Extract Transform Load (ETL), Data Warehousing, Python (Programming Language), Operational Data Store, SQL Databases, Data Lineage, Data Pipelines
- **Published:** September 4, 2026
- **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/data-engineer-lightning-ai-8654249

## About the Role

* 10+ years of total experience in analytics engineering, data engineering, or similar data-focused roles
 * Deep expertise in data modeling, ETL pipelines, and data warehouse architecture
 * Strong technical foundation with expertise in SQL, Python, and modern data stack tools (dbt, SQLMesh, etc)
 * Experience partnering with Data Science, Product, and Engineering leaders to deliver key product metrics and user behavior insights
 * Demonstrated ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on technical leadership
 * Strong communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for diverse audiences
 * Experience scaling analytics functions from early stage to maturity in rapidly changing environments
 * Track record of establishing data governance, quality standards, and best practices
 * A bias for action and urgency, not letting perfect be the enemy of the effective
 * A "full-stack mindset", not hesitating to do what it takes to solve a problem end-to-end

## Description

We're moving fast, and our data infrastructure needs to keep up. GPU telemetry, product usage, and operational signals are accumulating faster than our pipelines can surface them. We're at the stage where the right data foundation unlocks everything: better product decisions, faster model iteration, and cleaner ops. As our first Data Engineer, you will help us get there.

This is an early, high-scope role reporting to our VP of Product. You'll own data reliability across the company: clean tables, documented lineage, and signal flowing to where it's needed. You drive projects from conception to production without waiting to be told what to do next.

What You'll Do

 * Design and own ETL/ELT pipelines that move GPU telemetry, product usage, operational data, and customer data from where it lives to where it's useful
 * Build and maintain the clean, documented tables that analysts and data scientists actually work from - not raw dumps
 * Own data quality end-to-end: schema management, freshness monitoring, lineage tracking, and alerting when something breaks
 * Partner with engineering and GTM teams to instrument what isn't already tracked
 * Work closely with product, infra, and ML teams, primarily unblocking them


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