Staff Data Engineer

Starburst is the data platform for analytics, applications, and AI, unifying data across clouds and on-premises to accelerate AI innovation. Organizations—from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises in 60 countries—rely on Starburst for fast data access, seamless collaboration, and enterprise-grade governance on an open hybrid data lakehouse. Wherever data lives, Starburst unlocks its full potential, powering data and AI from development to deployment.

By future-proofing data architecture, Starburst helps businesses fuel innovation with AI. About the role Starburst is looking for an experienced Data Engineer to build and enhance internal usage, telemetry, and product data analytics for both Starburst Enterprise and Starburst Galaxy. This role focuses on using our own software to better understand our customers and how they use our products.

In addition, since data engineers are one of our key target personas, you will be able to provide valuable feedback to our teams as you use the products, in terms of performance, user experience, and integration with the larger data engineering ecosystem. You’ll work closely with our dynamic, talented, global engineers while emphasizing quality and speed to insights. As a Staff Data Engineer at Starburst you will: • Build and manage a high quality data lake to support various aspects of Startburst’s business, including product management, finance, customer support, and engineering. • Find innovative ways to use Trino and Starburst to solve data management challenges • Collaborate with technical leads, product managers and data analysts to build robust data products and analytics • Leverage AI to democratize access to datasets for users throughout Starburst. • Enable dataset preparation and model evaluation for Starbursts’ AI projects • Define and adapt data engineering processes and best practices to focus on execution and getting reliable answers to important business questions • Work closely with leaders from other teams and departments to iterate on both data architecture and design of data solutions, focusing on high-quality results accessible at several levels • Envision innovative approaches to data management and work with Starburst’s product teams to bring those innovations to market.

Some of the things we look for: • At least 7 years of data engineering experience, and a clear passion for data and analytics • Enthusiasm for working both independently and collaboratively with strong, diverse, high-performing teams to get value and insights from data • Experience building and optimizing data pipelines using Trino, Spark, dbt, and related frameworks. • Experience managing data infrastructure in public clouds. • Experience using and managing orchestration frameworks such as Apache Airflow or Dagster. • Knowledge of RAG and other design patterns for AI applications • Fluency in SQL • Experience building API integrations for extracting data from third party sources. • Excellent coding ability in Java, Python or Scala. • Knowledge of data modelling techniques which are appropriate for modern data lakes • Experience with a variety of AWS services such as EMR, EC2, S3, and IAM. Multi-cloud experience (GCP/Azure) is also nice to have. • Able to use Configuration-as-Code and Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Pulumi, Terraform, and/or Ansible. • Demonstrable experience in delivering value and hitting deadlines consistently • Has disciplined software engineering practices, including high code quality, extensive automated testing, and rigorous code review • Highly proficient in both written and verbal communication, coupled with strong organizational abilities • Ability to Travel: This role will require occasional in-person travel for purposes including but not limited to new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events. Actual travel expectations may vary by role and business needs.