Founding Senior Data Engineer

About the Role

As our Founding Backend and Data Engineer, you will own the data foundation and batch runtime for a new product we are building from scratch. This is a highly specialized data engineering role rather than a general backend position. While routine application development will be guided through regular technical reviews, your deep expertise in data modeling, set-based computation, and pipeline correctness will be the core of our technical architecture.

5+ YOE only

Core Stack: Python, PostgreSQL, Django, Server-rendered frontend (htmx).

Key Responsibilities

Deep Third-Party Data Ingestion: Architect robust ingestion systems. You will handle silent webhook failures and ensure strict reconciliation against source-of-truth totals.

Batch Computation: Execute heavy batch operations over large datasets using set-based SQL within fixed nightly maintenance windows.

Multi-Tenant Isolation: Build isolation as a core reliability feature, ensuring that one tenant's malformed data never degrades the performance or runtime of another.

System Resilience: Develop backfill and replay capabilities as first-class design features rather than afterthought emergency scripts.

Auditability: Maintain append-only, auditable records so that every automated system decision can be reconstructed and verified.

Fault-Tolerant Integrations: Construct vendor API integrations designed for failure, utilizing circuit breakers, retries, and comprehensive reconciliation.

Operational Foundation: Establish the primary operational metrics, alerting, data partitioning, and idempotent job execution.

Required Qualifications
Production Experience: 5 to 8 years of experience building and operating production systems.

PostgreSQL Depth: Advanced expertise in PostgreSQL, specifically around schema design, query planning, and batch performance at real scale.

Data Pipeline Ownership: Proven ownership of production data pipelines covering ingestion, transformation, reconciliation, and serving. Your experience must go beyond standard application-layer CRUD operations against an ORM.

Set-Based Thinking: A native understanding of sets over loops. You are highly proficient with multi-step SQL transformations, window functions, statistical aggregates (percentiles, distributions), and incremental computation.

Backend Python Mastery: Strong production Python backend experience. You have a proven track record of keeping business logic cleanly separated from framework details.

Test-First Mindset: You build with tests first. You understand that in batch jobs and reconciliations, a bug results in silently corrupt data for weeks.

Real-World Operational Experience: You have navigated severe system failures, including backed-up queues, silently dropped webhooks, and reconciliations that caught unnoticed data loss.

Written Communication: Excellent written communication skills. We are a documentation-driven team where technical development runs on written specifications and architectural decisions.

Autonomy: High comfort level working in a self-directed manner and owning outcomes. Your automated tests and written decisions maintain our quality bar.

Preferred Qualifications
Production experience with Django and e-commerce platforms.

Experience with streaming or event architecture (Kafka-class systems).

Familiarity with probabilistic and approximate data structures (HyperLogLog, Bloom filters, t-digest).

Comfortable building occasional server-rendered screens.

Our Technical Philosophy
Our initial iterations will run on a highly optimized PostgreSQL architecture. This is a deliberate technical choice rather than a constraint. Heavier distributed computing machinery, such as Spark, dedicated data warehouses, or distributed runtimes, is not ruled out but deferred until our scale demands it. Our technical roadmap requires real algorithmic depth, including incremental delta computation, mergeable sketches, and custom analytical query engines. You will be building the foundation for this future.