Senior Staff Data Engineer

Senior Staff Data Engineer USA, Remote Duration: Contract The Senior Staff Data Engineer is the technical owner of Client’s data platform, responsible for defining architecture, driving technical decisions, and delivering solutions that align with business objectives. This role serves as the primary technical authority across the data engineering team and will lead architecture discussions, mentor engineers, and set engineering standards. You will partner directly with engineering, product, data science, and business stakeholders to translate complex business needs into scalable technical solutions. You must navigate ambiguity, scope undefined problems, and drive them to completion independently. A strong emphasis on AI, both integrated in the development workflow and user-facing capabilities, is expected with a commitment to upskilling the team in modern tooling and practices. No prior insurance knowledge is required, but you must quickly develop deep domain expertise. Position Responsibilities • Own the technical architecture and long-term strategy of Client’s data platform, making technology decisions that balance scalability, maintainability, and business value. • Drive adoption of AI-assisted development practices and build AI-driven capabilities that create measurable business value • Partner with executive, product, engineering, and business stakeholders to translate complex business needs into technical strategy and delivery plans • Provide hands-on technical mentorship to data engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, and knowledge sharing • Navigate ambiguous, undefined problems by scoping them independently and delivering solutions aligned with business priorities • Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure for extraction, transformation, and loading from a wide variety of sources using AWS, DBT + SQL on Snowflake, Python, Docker, and Airflow. Minimum Qualifications • 7+ years of data engineering experience from requirements through production and maintenance • Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related degree or equivalent experience • Strong experience building, optimizing and debugging data models, pipelines and data warehousing using SQL, DBT and Snowflake • 7+ years of experience writing production software in a cloud-native environment using Python and AWS services (S3, Batch, ECR, DMS, MWAA) • Experience integrating AI/ML tools into development workflows or building AI-driven data products • Demonstrated experience as a technical authority by driving architecture decisions, setting engineering standards, and mentoring engineers • A successful history of transforming, processing and extracting value from large disconnected, datasets from a variety of data sources (Flat files, Excel, databases, APIs, etc.) • Experience working in a complex, fast-moving environment as part of a small, collaborative team Preferred Qualifications: • Insurance industry systems and technology experience • Experience building AI/ML pipelines or leading AI adoption initiatives across engineering teams • Prior experience working in a staff or principal engineer role or equivalent technical leadership position • Experience operating in a high-growth or PE-backed environment with competing priorities and fast timelines