Senior Staff Data Engineer

About the role

At BILL, we believe in empowering the businesses that drive our economy. By replacing outdated financial processes with innovative tools, we help businesses—from startups to established brands—make smarter decisions and gain control of their operations. The Data Platform team builds and operates BILL’s core data infrastructure, providing the end-to-end foundation that collects, stores, processes, governs, and serves data so every team at BILL can use it. We own the full data stack: inbound and outbound data lake, real-time streaming pipelines, batch processing, and data access layers including a Starburst query engine, Databricks Feature Store, Neo4j Knowledge Graph, and OpenSearch. Our charter is to simplify the data landscape and power AI at BILL by building scalable platform capabilities rather than creating one-off pipelines or analytics reports. Engineers here work at the systems level: designing architectures, incubating new capabilities, setting standards, and enabling the rest of BILL to self-serve. The team sits within the CTO organization.

Responsibilities

• Operate at the architectural level, driving platform-wide technical decisions and mentoring the team.
• Own and evolve critical infrastructure across the full data lifecycle, spanning ingest, store, enrich, query, and serve.
• Architect and own critical data platform capabilities end-to-end, from inbound ingestion through data lake storage to downstream serving, including the feature store, query engine, knowledge graph, and search.
• Define technical direction for the team’s most complex, cross-cutting problems, such as streaming versus batch trade-offs, schema contracts, data access patterns, and real-time serving architectures.
• Drive design and delivery of new capabilities from inception to GA, including reference implementations, SLAs, and clear ownership handoff models.
• Establish and maintain architectural standards and engineering patterns adopted across the organization.
• Lead multi-phase technical migrations at enterprise scale, including compute platform upgrades, warehouse-to-lake migrations, and infrastructure modernization.
• Partner with engineering teams across BILL, such as ML/AI, Risk, Payments, and Analytics, to translate diverse data needs into durable platform solutions.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, actively shaping the technical culture and engineering quality bar of the team.
• Own and continuously improve critical production systems with a focus on reliability, cost efficiency, and a self-serve developer experience.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, distributed systems, or software engineering with a heavy focus on data infrastructure.
• 5+ years of experience specifically on data platform, data infrastructure, or data systems teams, rather than purely analytics or BI roles.
• Expertise in distributed systems design for data workloads, including a deep understanding of streaming, batch, and real-time serving trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience with event streaming platforms (such as Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, or equivalent) and CDC-based ingestion patterns.
• Strong proficiency with batch processing stacks (such as Airflow, dbt, Spark/Glue, or equivalent).
• Experience with modern open table formats and data lake architectures, including Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or equivalent frameworks.
• Familiarity with data access and serving layers, including query engines (Trino/Starburst, Presto), feature stores, vector stores, or graph databases.
• Expert-level SQL and strong Python skills, backed by solid software engineering fundamentals such as CI/CD, testing, and observability.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and operating large-scale, production-grade data platforms.
• A proven track record operating as a technical lead, with the ability to drive ambiguous, high-impact projects from first principles to production.
• The ability to define technical standards that hold across organizational boundaries rather than just within a single team.

Desired Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in financial services, fintech, or SaaS companies.
• Experience building self-serve data platforms or developer-facing infrastructure tooling.
• Experience working in fintech, financial data, or highly regulated data environments.

Pay

The estimated salary ranges for this role in the specific geographic zones are as follows:

• Zone 1: San Francisco Bay Area CA (includes HQ), New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles County: $195,800—$244,800 USD
• Zone 2: CA (Non San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County), Austin TX, Massachusetts: $176,200—$220,300 USD
• Zone 3: Utah (includes Utah office), Dallas TX, Houston TX, Florida, North Carolina, Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, Oregon, Pennsylvania: $166,400—$208,100 USD

Benefits

• 100% paid employee health, dental, and vision plans (choose HMO, PPO, or HDHP)
• HSA & FSA accounts
• Life Insurance, Long & Short-term disability coverage
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• 11+ Observed holidays and wellness days, plus flexible time off
• Employee Stock Purchase Program with employee discounts
• Wellness & Fitness initiatives
• Employee recognition and referral programs