MEET INSTINCT

Instinct Science is an animal health software company that helps the world’s leading veterinary practices deliver exceptional patient care, improve staff efficiency, and minimize team stress and burnout. Our easy-to-use EMR platform acts as the nerve center for veterinarians, veterinary nurses, and support staff alike, fostering seamless collaboration across teams. With our January 2024 acquisition of VetMedux, a company providing trusted education (Clinician’s Brief) and clinical decision support (Standards of Care™, Plumb’s) for veterinarians, Instinct has strengthened our commitment to delivering the mission-critical tools veterinary practices need to care for their patients at the highest level and with the best outcomes.
We’re fueled by compassion! Our team, our customers, and their patients and animal owners matter immensely to us. We put the Customer First; Act with Grace, Not Teeth; Do the Right Things for the Right Reasons; and know that Excellence is in our DNA.
If these values speak to you, you might be a good fit for our Senior Data Engineer job.

A SNEAK PEEK OF YOUR ROLE

This job, and the team at Instinct, is remote.
As a Senior Data Engineer, you will be responsible for building, maintaining, and scaling our core data infrastructure across Redshift, Airflow, and AWS. You will work closely with both Platform and Product Engineering teams to ensure our data systems are secure, reliable, and easy to work with.
This role is not just about owning the pipelines. You’ll help productize our internal data services, reduce internal friction, and turn our data architecture into a key market differentiator. You will mentor others, provide strategic input on data design, and help the company move faster through better data access, quality, and observability.

WHAT YOU’LL DO ‍

• Empower Others through Reliable Data Systems
• Design, build, and maintain scalable ETL pipelines using Airflow, dbt, and AWS-native services
• Manage and optimize Redshift clusters for performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency
• Own the architecture and lifecycle of our core data infrastructure
• Lead with Purpose, Support with Context
• Serve as the subject matter expert on data engineering for both platform and product teams
• Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure data is modeled and accessible in ways that support reporting and feature development
• Help define data governance policies and enforce access controls across services
• Trust Through Transparency and Resilience
• Build observability and alerting into pipelines to catch issues before they impact users
• Implement monitoring and reliability tools using Datadog or similar platforms
• Ensure systems are designed to meet compliance and audit standards (SOC 2, HIPAA, etc.)
• Champion Curiosity and Collaboration
• Partner cross-functionally to gather data requirements and translate them into scalable solutions
• Participate in sprint planning, design reviews, and retrospectives
• Mentor junior team members and promote data engineering best practices across the company