Staff Data Engineer, Collectors
$165-250k
Authentication & sale services for high-value collectibles
Open for applications
Authentication & sale services for high-value collectibles
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$165-250k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help collectors pursue their passion through industry leading grading and authentication, tools to help collectors research and find the next big thing, and marketplaces to buy and sell.
Role
Who you are
- A seasoned data engineer with 8+ years building data platforms and pipelines in production, with a track record of technical leadership at the staff or senior level
- An expert in the modern data stack. You have deep, hands-on experience with cloud data warehousing (BigQuery or equivalent), dbt, and modern ingestion tooling — and strong opinions, loosely held, about when to buy versus build
- A systems thinker. You design for scale, failure, and change — and you can articulate the trade-offs between architectural options clearly, in writing and in person
- Fluent in AI-assisted development. You have real experience developing with Claude Code or a similar coding agent, and you treat it as a core part of how modern engineering gets done rather than a novelty
- Reliability-obsessed. You believe pipelines should be tested, observable, and boring — and you've built the tooling and practices to make that true on teams you've worked with
- Governance-minded without being risk-averse. You know how to design access controls, auditability, and data-quality safeguards that earn trust in the numbers without slowing the team down
- A force multiplier. You raise the bar for those around you through mentorship, review, and example, and you're energized by making other engineers better
- Technically fluent and a clear communicator. You're expert in SQL and Python, deeply comfortable with version control, CI/CD, and testing workflows, and able to explain technical decisions to audiences from individual contributors to executive leadership
- Cloud-infrastructure fluent. You work comfortably beyond the data warehouse, managing serverless compute, storage, and secrets on a major cloud platform like GCP or AWS
- A forward-thinking architect. You stay ahead of where the data stack is heading, with well-reasoned views on lakehouse patterns and query engines that you test through hands-on work
What the job involves
- We're transforming the collecting experience with technology that brings authentication, grading, and trading into the modern era
- Our products are equalizing the playing field by providing tools that make complex research analytics — including pricing, scarcity reports, and historic sales data — accessible to every collector, old or new
- Our engineering mission is to democratize technology while promoting innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning throughout the organization
- We're looking for a Staff Data Engineer to serve as the senior technical leader for our data platform
- This is a hands-on IC role with outsized influence: you'll own the architecture and reliability of the pipelines that move data across the business, set the technical bar for the engineers around you, and build the platform foundations that our analytics, reporting, and AI agents depend on
- You'll report to the Staff Manager, Data Engineering & Analytics
- Remote or hybrid candidates will also be considered
- We believe that there is significant value in in-person collaboration
- Own the architecture of our data platform, spanning ingestion (Hevo, Estuary), our Google BigQuery warehouse, and the dbt transformation layer — designing systems that are scalable, reliable, secure, and built to last
- Set the technical bar as a senior IC, leading through design reviews, code review, and mentorship — raising the quality, rigor, and engineering discipline of the team without a formal management role
- Build and harden data ingestion at scale, designing batch and CDC pipelines across a diverse set of sources — operational databases, SaaS applications, and ERP systems — and driving vendor and tooling decisions with a clear point of view
- Develop end-to-end with AI coding agents. Our teams build with Claude Code and similar tools, and you'll help define the practices, guardrails, and standards that make AI-assisted engineering fast, safe, and high-quality
- Invest in reliability and observability, establishing testing, monitoring, alerting, and incident-response practices so data lands on time, is trusted, and failures are caught before stakeholders notice
- Strengthen governance and controls, implementing the access models, auditability, and operational rigor expected of a company operating at scale and under growing scrutiny
- Lay the foundations for agentic analytics, building the well-modeled, well-governed platform that agents and MCP connections rely on to deliver trustworthy answers from data
- Partner with analytics engineers, analysts, and stakeholders to understand data needs, unblock high-value use cases, and translate business requirements into durable platform capabilities
- Engineer tooling and services beyond the warehouse - building the APIs, automated jobs, and internal tools in Python that make the platform run smoothly and put data in more people's hands than SQL alone can reach
- Drive the evolution of our warehouse architecture - leading hands-on POCs on lakehouse patterns, open table formats, and alternative query engines, and deciding what's worth adopting next
Our take
Collectors offers a range of services for the collectibles industry including authentication and grading, collectibles research and sourcing tools, and a buy-and-sell marketplace. The industry is going through a huge renaissance, with a particularly high demand for sports and trading games cards, and Collectors has come to the fore as a major name.
The fact that Collectors is more than a marketplace serves it well in the space. Indeed, its most popular services appear to be grading and authentication, as well as storage vault services. And, with the collectibles industry forecast to double in value by the end of the decade, Collectors is in a position of serious strength.
The company has seen some good investment too, totalling over $200 million. It continues to expand its services with acquisitions of other players in the sector, and is now the parent of PSA, PSA Vault, PCGS, SGC, Card Ladder, Collectors Financial Services and Beckett.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Employee Discounts: Be your own customer. Receive discounts on select grading services for approved submissions.
- 401(K) Matching Plan: Invest in your future with our competitive 401k matching plan.
- Health Insurance: Collectors offers medical, dental, and vision for you and your family’s well being.
- Vacation/Paid Time Off: Enjoy time away from work with paid vacation for full-time employees.
- Holiday Pay: All regular, full-time employees are eligible for 10 company paid holidays.
- Flexible Hours: Flexible schedules with varying shifts are available to accommodate your needs.
Company HQ
Santa Ana, CA
Leadership
Nat Turner
(CEO)Angel investor and well-known sports card collector. As well as being CEO of Collectors, is a board member at OneOncology and former board member at health companies Sema4 and Clover Health. Co-founded and led Flatiron Health (Acquired by Roche) from 2012 - 2022.
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