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.

Even better if you have

• 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).

Skills

• Strong understanding of distributed systems and microservices architecture.
• Experience with data warehousing technologies such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks.
• Knowledge of data modeling and SQL optimization.
• Experience with data governance and compliance standards.

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.