Senior Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

About the role

We're hiring a Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, and operate the data systems that power Decagon's AI products. You'll own critical data pipelines and storage layers end-to-end, improve reliability and performance, and create paved paths that let every Decagon engineer work confidently with data at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement high-throughput data pipelines and streaming systems with strong SLOs, clear runbooks, and actionable telemetry.
• Build and operate real-time and batch ingestion infrastructure using tools like Kafka, Flink, and Airflow.
• Own our analytical data layer — schema design, query performance, and cost optimization across ClickHouse, BigQuery, or similar.
• Partner with research and product teams to architect data solutions, evaluate performance, and scale new features.
• Tune pipeline and query latencies: optimize data paths, apply smart caching/partitioning, and hit tight p95/p99 targets.
• Lead infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and GitOps practices for data systems; reduce drift with reusable modules and policy-as-code.
• Participate in on-call and drive down toil through automation and elimination of recurring data issues.

Requirements

• 5+ years building and operating production data infrastructure at scale.
• Hands-on experience with Tier 1 data technologies: ClickHouse, Kafka (or MSK/Pub-Sub/RabbitMQ), and Flink or dbt.
• Proven track record meeting high availability and low latency targets across streaming and batch workloads.
• Excellent observability chops (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog) and strong incident response discipline.
• Clear written communication and the ability to turn ambiguous data requirements into simple, reliable designs.
• Experience with CDC tooling (Debezium) and orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect).
• Familiarity with Spark or Dask for large-scale data processing.
• Experience with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks).
• Experience being an early data/platform/infrastructure engineer at another company.
• Strong Kubernetes experience (GKE/EKS/AKS) and multi-cloud exposure (GCP, AWS, Azure).

Qualifications

• Experience with customer-managed deployments.
• Compensation range: $200K – $400K + offers equity.
• Benefits: Take what you need vacation policy, medical, dental, and vision benefits, life insurance and disability benefits, retirement plan, parental leave, fertility and family building benefits, daily lunches and snacks in the office.

Skills

• Strong problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Experience with cloud-native technologies.
• Knowledge of DevOps practices.

Benefits

• Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave).
• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family.
• Life Insurance and Disability Benefits.
• Retail Plan (e.g., 401K, pension).
• Parental Leave.
• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot.
• Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best.