Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Summary

Join Liftoff's Data Platform team as a Backend Engineer and contribute to the evolution of our data infrastructure. You will build and own core engines, improve tooling, partner with the product team, and foster an engineering excellence culture. This role requires strong coding skills, solid CS fundamentals, and experience with high-scale distributed systems. A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience and 8+ years of software engineering experience are necessary. The position offers full-time remote work options in several states and a competitive compensation package including equity and health benefits. Liftoff is a remote-first company with US hubs in Redwood City, Los Angeles, and New York City.

Requirements

• Very strong coding ability
• Solid core CS fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, architecting systems)
• A high bar for quality and perfection, and the ability to temper it when necessary to ship
• Sets ego aside in pursuit of finding the best solution, no matter where it comes from
• Self-motivated and ability to get things done
• Excited to work on large scale data stores and distributed systems
• Ability to lead across team and role boundaries to effect large scale change in culture and systems
• B.S. or higher in Computer Science (or equivalent work experience)
• 8+ years software engineering experience
• Experience building and debugging high scale distributed systems and backend architectures
• A healthy sense of fun!

Responsibilities

• Build and have end-to-end ownership of Liftoff's core engines, including distributed data stores, data processing pipelines, and high-performance services
• Improve tooling and infrastructure to ship multiple times a day with quantified impact on millions of users and our business's revenue
• Partner with the product team to plan short and long term strategy
• Contribute to an “engineering excellence” culture through state-of-the-art tools, risk-driven testing, explainable systems, and code review

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in big data engines such as Trino, Spark
• Experience with Hive metastore, Iceberg or Delta Lake
• Experience with streaming data
• Experience with data stores such as Redis

Benefits

• This role is eligible for full-time remote work in one of our entities: CA, CO, ID, IL, FL, GA, MA, MI, MN, MO, NJ, NV, NY, OR, TX, UT, and WA
• Liftoff offers all employees a full compensation package that includes equity and health/vision/dental benefits associated with your country of residence
• The following are our base salary ranges for this role: SF Bay Area, NYC, Los Angeles/Orange County : $185,000 - $245,000
• Seattle/Olympia, San Diego, Santa Barbara : $170,000 - $225,000
• All other cities and towns in our approved states: $160,000 - $210,000