Staff Data Pipeline Engineer at Netlify

, , -

Full Time

Start Date

Immediate

Expiry Date

21 Jan, 26

Salary

227000.0

Posted On

23 Oct, 25

Experience

5 year(s) or above

Remote Job

Yes

Telecommute

Yes

Sponsor Visa

Skills

Kafka, Data Pipelines, Streaming Data, Snowflake, ClickHouse, SQL, Go, Python, Java, Observability, Monitoring, Data Modeling, CI/CD, Event Streaming, Data Architecture, Mentoring

Industry

Software Development

Description

About the Team At Netlify, the Data, Insights & Systems team sits at the heart of our go-to-market strategy. We power the infrastructure that drives our product insights, billing, and customer experience. As one of the largest website hosting platforms, our data systems power key customer-facing features, from real-time observability and error tracking to usage-based billing. These systems have evolved organically over time and now need structure, observability, and performance optimization at scale. This is a rare opportunity to make a foundational impact as the first dedicated pipeline engineer embedded within our engineering organization. You’ll work across our entire data ecosystem, from the engineers instrumenting data collection to the analysts and systems consuming it, helping to establish best practices while rolling up your sleeves to build and refactor alongside a small but mighty team. In this role, you’ll be responsible for designing, scaling, and maintaining Kafka-based streaming pipelines, supporting system observability and scalability, and ensuring the reliability and efficiency of our billing and analytics data infrastructure. While this role will live within the Data, Insights, and Systems team, you will work closely with Netlify’s Site Reliability Engineering team to plan and architect the next iteration of our Kafka platform. While our current infrastructure is supported by SRE, we’re looking for someone with a strong data architecture background who can help design and guide the long-term evolution of our Kafka solutions. Your work will directly impact how we deliver usage-based billing and real-time analytics to our customers. Joining our team is a unique opportunity to work alongside some of the smartest, most motivated, and kindest people in the industry. We’re looking for builders, people who love to roll up their sleeves and get things done. What You’ll Do Design, build, and optimize high-performance data pipelines that power critical business and customer-facing systems. Implement and maintain real-time streaming pipelines using Kafka and both relational and non-relational databases (MongoDB, Snowflake, ClickHouse) to support operational and analytical use cases. Refactor legacy data systems to improve performance, scalability, and reliability, while ensuring billing systems remain stable and data flows remain accurate for downstream processes. Build robust observability and alerting systems to surface data quality or reliability issues before they impact customers or billing. Contribute to systems engineering efforts within the data organization, emphasizing observability, monitoring, and infrastructure-as-code best practices. Partner closely with Software Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Engineers, and Systems Admins to enable reliable data modeling, reporting, and invoicing across self-serve and enterprise billing environments. Drive architectural decisions and evaluate tooling and frameworks to improve performance and cost efficiency. Mentor other engineers on data pipeline best practices, from instrumentation to consumption. Document architecture, runbooks, and operational processes to ensure cross-team confidence and sustainability. Balance innovation with pragmatism, knowing when to experiment versus stabilize given our small team and large production footprint. Identify and implement internal process improvements: automating manual workflows, optimizing data delivery, and redesigning infrastructure for greater scalability. What You’ll Bring Extensive experience building and operating real-time, event-driven data processing systems at scale. Hands-on experience managing and scaling Kafka clusters and streaming data pipelines in a production environment. Deep expertise in event streaming architectures and messaging systems (Kafka, Kinesis, or similar). Strong proficiency with Snowflake, ClickHouse and data modeling for analytical and operational workloads. Experience working across multi-cloud environments (GCP and AWS preferred). Proficiency in SQL and programming languages Go, Python, or Java. Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools (Datadog, Grafana, Monte Carlo etc.). Experience with source/version control (Git) and CI/CD workflows for data systems. Demonstrated ability to write production code and design scalable, fault-tolerant data infrastructure. Track record of mentoring engineers, fostering a culture of data reliability, and improving team capabilities. Excellent communication skills and collaborative mindset for working cross-functionally with data, engineering, product and finance teams. Preferred but not required: experience with usage-based billing or metering systems, and/or experience with tools like dbt and Airflow for orchestration. This Role is a Great Fit If: You thrive in roles that blend systems engineering and data architecture, and enjoy owning mission-critical data systems. You’re energized by solving challenges around scalability, reliability, and observability in streaming data infrastructure. You enjoy autonomy and can navigate ambiguity while delivering measurable outcomes. You’re motivated by improving billing accuracy, operational efficiency, and data quality across systems that directly impact revenue and customer trust. You thrive in a collaborative, low-ego environment, working with a small but high-performing engineering team. You see ambiguity as a creative opportunity and approach complex systems with curiosity and structure. You enjoy teaching and mentoring, helping backend engineers improve data instrumentation and empowering data consumers to use pipelines effectively. You’re excited by both greenfield opportunities and modernizing legacy systems. You want to work on a globally distributed, fully remote team that values autonomy, transparency, and shared ownership. You’re comfortable influencing architecture-level decisions while still being hands-on with the codebase. Applying Not sure you meet 100% of our qualifications? Please apply anyway! When applying please include: A resume or short listing of your job history & skills (link to a LinkedIn profile would be fine). We appreciate a cover letter explaining why you would enjoy working in this role at Netlify to get to know you a bit better, though this is not required and will not impact your application. Our mission is to “build a better web” and that cannot be done without a diversity of skill sets, backgrounds and thoughts. Of everything we've ever built at Netlify, we are most proud of our team. Netlify is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are devoted to building a team of people with diverse backgrounds and lifestyles. Driving equality empowers our team, enables us to innovate, and helps us maintain a more inclusive environment. We don’t discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, race, military/veteran status, citizenship, pregnancy status, or any other differences. If we can do anything to provide a better interview, i.e. accommodate a disability, then please let us know by emailing accommodations@netlify.com. About Netlify Netlify is the most popular way to build, deploy, and scale modern web applications, empowering everyone from fast moving solo developers to enterprise teams. Millions of developers and organizations rely on Netlify as their platform of choice for composing web applications that are production ready, performant, and flexible. Now, as we embrace the next era of software development, we are embedding the same fluid, intuitive experience into the Agent Experience (AX), making it just as simple for intelligent agents to understand, interact with, and act on our platform as it is for developers. Whether your user is human or machine, Netlify ensures the path from idea to URL is seamless, fast, and deeply reliable. We are a Series D company that has raised over $200M from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, EQT, Bessemer, BOND, and Menlo Ventures. As a fully distributed company, we aim to create a company culture where the best idea can come from anywhere and strive to be thoughtful, compassionate, and collaborative in our work. If this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, we’re excited to connect with you! At Netlify, we are committed to a compensation philosophy that prioritizes fairness and equity, positions our employee compensation competitively in the market, recognizes and rewards performance, and takes a comprehensive approach to our rewards package. We anchor our compensation philosophy on a market-based approach, therefore salary ranges may differ depending on the labor cost in a particular location. The salary provided is in addition to robust benefits and participation in Netlify’s equity plan. The hiring range approved for this role is targeted at $168,000 - $227,000 for most US-based locations. Candidates outside the US or in premium markets should consult with their Talent Acquisition partner regarding location-based ranges, as they may be higher or lower than the average US range listed. The starting pay will be determined based on multiple factors, including expertise and skills, market demands, experience, internal equity, and applicable geographic location. These compensation packages and ranges are subject to change and may be modified in the future.

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Responsibilities

Design, build, and optimize high-performance data pipelines that power critical business and customer-facing systems. Implement and maintain real-time streaming pipelines using Kafka and various databases to support operational and analytical use cases.