Staff Data Platform Engineer

Summary

Join Gemini's Data Platform Engineering team as a Staff Data Platform Engineer and play a crucial role in building, scaling, and maintaining our data infrastructure. You will lead the design and implementation of scaling strategies for relational database systems, ensuring high availability and scalability. Responsibilities include proactive monitoring and optimization of database systems, participation in on-call rotation, and collaboration with data and product engineering teams. You will leverage your expertise in various database technologies and contribute to infrastructure automation and reliability. This role requires deep expertise in data and storage technologies, advanced database scaling strategies, and strong programming skills. Gemini offers a competitive compensation and benefits package, including a competitive salary, annual bonus, equity grant, comprehensive health plans, 401k matching, paid parental leave, and flexible time off.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in data and storage technologies, including RDBMS (e.g., Postgres), NoSQL, and other database types (e.g., columnar, document, key-value, and unstructured), with a strong understanding of tradeoffs and use cases for each
• Demonstrated experience with advanced database scaling strategies for relational systems
• Strong knowledge of high-availability architectures and proficiency with monitoring tools to support uptime and incident response
• Experience with cloud-based database and data processing platforms, such as Amazon Aurora, Databricks, AWS RDS, Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, and managed services like AWS EMR and Google Cloud Dataflow
• Familiarity with message queues, ETL workflows, and data pipelines for real-time and batch processing
• Strong programming skills (e.g., Python, Bash, SQL) and experience with CI/CD practices
• Experience in an on-call rotation and handling incident response
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a proven ability to work effectively with data and product engineering teams

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scaling strategies for relational systems to ensure they meet the high availability and scalability needs of data and product engineering teams
• Proactively monitor and optimize database systems to meet stringent uptime requirements
• Participate in an on-call rotation to respond to incidents, troubleshoot issues, and restore service promptly during disruptions
• Manage a variety of database technologies, balancing tradeoffs across relational, columnar, document, key-value, and unstructured data solutions, providing a foundation for data warehousing and supporting data-driven product needs
• Collaborate with data and product engineering teams to implement and optimize data pipelines, including message queues (e.g., Kafka), ETL workflows, and real-time processing, ensuring efficient and reliable data movement
• Utilize infrastructure as code (IaC) to automate deployment, scaling, and maintenance, creating a consistent, reliable environment that supports high availability and deployment efficiency for both data and product teams
• Conduct performance tuning, establish monitoring and alerting, and address potential issues quickly to ensure a responsive platform that meets the needs of all engineering workloads
• Document processes, including scaling strategies, monitoring setups, and best practices, to support alignment with engineering requirements and ensure smooth handoffs in on-call situations

Benefits

• Competitive starting salary
• A discretionary annual bonus
• Long-term incentive in the form of a new hire equity grant
• Comprehensive health plans
• 401K with company matching
• Paid Parental Leave
• Flexible time off