Staff Software Engineer, Data
About the role
Gradial is the marketing operations system of work that helps marketers and creatives move from idea to execution faster. Our platform orchestrates across martech stacks, workflows, and people to automate marketing execution, cutting execution time, so marketers focus on the work only humans can do: shaping brands, understanding customers, and creating the work that moves people. Backed by leading investors, we’re building software that adapts to the user, not the other way around. We move with urgency, operate with ownership, and solve hard problems from first principles. If you want to do ambitious work, take real responsibility, and help define the future of AI-native content operations, you’ll do your best work here.
As a Staff Software Engineer, Data at Gradial, you will be our first dedicated data platform engineer, owning the platform end to end while staying deeply hands-on. You will shape the data layer behind our product, from Postgres data modeling and multimodal indexing and search to the pipelines that keep large, fast-changing enterprise content in sync across images, PDFs, text and other document types. Your ownership will also extend to the company-wide data platform, including the warehouse and self-serve exploration tools that help teams across engineering and go-to-market make better decisions from reliable data. You will decide what to build first, build it and shape how Gradial uses data as we scale.
Responsibilities
- Define and execute the roadmap for Gradial’s data platform across product, engineering and company-wide data needs.
- Own data modeling for our production databases, designing schemas and access patterns that scale with the product.
- Lead the evolution of multimodal indexing and search across images, documents and text, with a focus on retrieval quality, performance and reliability.
- Build and own reliable data pipelines across production databases, product events and third-party systems.
- Build the warehouse, governed metrics and self-serve tooling that help teams answer their own questions with confidence.
- Instrument the customer lifecycle from first lead through delivered value, giving teams a clear view into how customers move through the Gradial platform.
- Set the standard for data quality, contracts and observability as our product and data surface area grow.
- Make pragmatic architecture and build-vs-buy decisions that balance speed, scalability and cost.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering or related roles with ownership of complex data systems. You've chosen the stack, not only operated one.
- Proven success defining and building data architecture in fast-moving, high-growth environments.
- Deep expertise in relational database design, including schemas, indexing, query patterns and consistency tradeoffs.
- Strong experience building production data pipelines, warehouses and analytical data models.
- Experience building production search systems, including embedding-based or hybrid retrieval and evaluating retrieval quality.
- A track record of shipping reliable production code and making sound architecture decisions across complex systems.
- Strong judgment in ambiguous environments, with the ability to prioritize, make pragmatic