Staff Data Pipeline Engineer, Netlify
$168-227k
+ Equity plan
SQL
MongoDB
AWS
GCP
Python
Java
Kafka
Go
Airflow
Grafana
Snowflake
Kinesis
Git
dbt
Datadog
Senior and Expert level
Remote from Canada, UK, US
Unified code automation platform for websites and apps
Be an early applicant
Unified code automation platform for websites and apps
201-500 employees
B2BEnterpriseSaaSCloud ComputingWeb Design
Be an early applicant
$168-227k
+ Equity plan
SQL
MongoDB
AWS
GCP
Python
Java
Kafka
Go
Airflow
Grafana
Snowflake
Kinesis
Git
dbt
Datadog
Senior and Expert level
Remote from Canada, UK, US
201-500 employees
B2BEnterpriseSaaSCloud ComputingWeb Design
Company mission
To make sure the web changes for the better.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- We’re looking for builders, people who love to roll up their sleeves and get things done
- 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
- 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
- Not sure you meet 100% of our qualifications? Please apply anyway!
What the job involves
- 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
- Your work will directly impact how we deliver usage-based billing and real-time analytics to our customers
- This role will 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
Application process
- 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 take
Servers have been essential to web development since the rise of the internet, but advancements in online infrastructure are causing them to become antiquated. This has resulted in a demand for an alternative to servers that is easier to deploy and scale on today’s web.
Netlify provides a platform that takes care of back end infrastructure for front end developers. The technology uses a new server architecture named Jamstack which migrates development functionality to a web browser. As a result, websites can be rendered directly through API microservices instead of calling servers.
Netlify aims to cut costs and save time by removing the necessity for a server within a client’s stack. The company has more than 4 million developers, and continues to focus on scaling its enterprise customers which stands at over 475 and currently includes Google, Facebook and Unilever.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
-13% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Dec 2021
$105m
SERIES D
Mar 2020
$53m
SERIES C
Total funding: $214.1m
Company benefits
- We offer full benefits including flexible time off, sponsored mental health resources, at least 16 weeks of parental leave, $2k/yearly learning and development allowance, 401k, and more
- Build out a home office with a generous starting stipend. Expense your internet, cell phone, or co-working membership within a monthly allowance
- We are a distributed culture but we also like to get together and meet! Netli-meet your coworkers at annual team offsites and all hands
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Christian Bach
(CCO & CSO)Editor, Lineproducer & Researcher at Winston ApS. Was CEO & Owner of CAPSIZE products ApS. Was Partner & CDO at CONNECTED A/S. Jury member of the Danish Digital Award.
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