Senior / Staff Data Platform Engineer

About the role

We're looking for a Data Platform Engineer to build out the next generation of our data platform. The ideal candidate has been a data platform engineer on a large system and is energized by deeply understanding customer pain points and opportunities related to our data platform.

To date this has been a shared responsibility on our engineering team, but as we've grown to over 1 billion API calls per day (with lots of data exhaust into our data lake), we're hiring a Data Platform Engineering team to modernize and level up our data stack. This role can be either in our NYC HQ or remote in the US.

How We Work

Most of our engineering team are former technical co-founders or former Radar interns from schools like Waterloo and CMU. Most engineers at Radar fit one of two molds, technically: either Staff level expertise in one stack, or "Multi-Stack" at any level. We say "Multi-Stack" because "Full-Stack" has the connotation of "Frontend and Backend", but Radar Engineers might also work on Mobile or Data engineering.

We care a lot about shipping fast and talking to customers. We're committed to our product vision of full-stack location infrastructure, but we also know that customer feedback is a treasure map to gold. Even though Slack is the brain of our company, working together in-person in our NYC HQ is the fastest way for us to get things done. We meet on Mondays to plan out work for the week in small groups and use Linear for planning. All projects are run by an Engineering lead, an executive and a Go-to-Market lead. Engineers figure out what to build, talk to customers, talk to prospects, help close them, get them live and make them successful.

One of our most important company values is "Walk a mile," as in walking a mile in the customer's shoes, but also as in literally walking a mile, getting up from your desk and developing a deep understanding of how location services behave in the real world. To us, a week is a long time, and we expect to ship big things every week.

The Stack

Our data stack includes Kinesis, S3, Athena, Terraform, Airflow, Parquet, Metabase, Python, Redis, MongoDB, and Kubernetes. Our primary languages are TypeScript, Rust, and Python. Most engineers are in the on-call rotation. We sponsor OpenStreetMaps, MapLibre, and OpenAddresses.

How We Use AI

Engineers choose what AI tools they use, Claude and Codex being the most popular. We're actively building Claude skills - for example we've taught it how to debug HorizonDB, our geospatial database. All code changes are reviewed by an Engineer knowledgeable in that area. Claude and Codex also review all PRs. There is a range of how much engineers use AI. Most use it daily if not weekly. We are excited about what AI can do, but we also recognize the risks and don't compromise our coding standards.

The Hiring Process

After a call with our Technical Recruiter, you'll do several technical Zoom calls with members of our engineering team: code screen, coding round, and system design round. If those go well we'll invite you to our NYC HQ for a final round interview. You'll meet one of our co-founders, someone from outside engineering, and meet more people from Radar. We'll go into more depth about how we work to see if there is a match.

What You’ll Do

• Work on core Radar data infrastructure built with Kinesis, S3, Athena, Terraform, Airflow, Parquet, Metabase, Python, Redis, and Mongo (some of these need to be replaced - you'll help figure out what that looks like)
• Improve our current data platform via incremental improvements and deploying next generation infra to level up our stack
• Talk to Radar customers and prospects, hear their feedback, incorporate it into your work and make them successful

You Should Have

• Experience building data infrastructure
• Experience with some of our current data stack, have experience with several of Snowflake, Clickhouse, Databricks, Dynamo and dbt or similar tools
• Interest in talking to customers or prospects and making them successful
• Deeply curious about how things work, and have the tenacity to sit with hard problems and power through them

Bonus Points

• If You Are a former technical co-founder
• If You Have experience building end-to-end customer facing analytics, real-time streaming solutions, leveraging cold and hot storage to achieve product goals

What You’ll Work With

• Tim Julien, CTO
• Our customers and prospects
• Our Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and Sales teams

What We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful stock options in a fast-growing company
• 401(k) plan with 4% match
• New HQ in Flatiron, NY
• Top-notch equipment
• Catered lunches
• Unlimited PTO
• Health, dental, and vision insurance with 100% coverage for employees
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Commuter and fitness benefits

Compensation

For candidates based in the United States, the base salary range for this full-time position is between $200,000 - $300,000/year with an opportunity for performance bonuses and incentives. In addition to cash compensation, Radar offers full-time employees stock option grants under its equity plan. This is a meaningful ownership stake in the company we provide to our employees as we build a category-defining company. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Your exact offer may vary based on market location, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.