About the role
As Apartment List's data platform grows across more domains, more pipelines, and more
stakeholders, the architectural decisions made today determine how much technical debt we're
paying down in a year. We're looking for a Senior Data Engineer II (IC4) to own that
architecture; end-to-end pipeline design, platform investment tradeoffs, and the technical
judgment calls that keep the system reliable as it scales.
This is not a design-from-the-whiteboard role. You'll still be hands-on-keyboard: writing
pipelines, debugging production issues, and shipping code alongside the team. What sets this
role apart is scope; you'll make architectural decisions independently, influence how Analytics
Engineering, Data Science, and Engineering partners build on the platform, and be the person
other data engineers come to when a design decision needs a second opinion. You'll work
closely with Analytics Engineering, Data Science, and Engineering partners to shape how the
data platform evolves.
Here's what you'll do as part of the team
- Own and evolve data pipeline architecture across core domains — ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving — making project-level architectural decisions independently and evaluating tradeoffs between freshness, cost, scalability, and simplicity.
- Lead the design and implementation of platform-level improvements: warehouse cost management, compute efficiency, and access control architecture, treating reliability, observability, and cost efficiency as core design constraints rather than afterthoughts.
- Identify and lead technical initiatives that improve the platform's long-term health —proactively surfacing investments (orchestration, CI/CD, data access, developer experience) before they become blockers, and making the case for them.
- Drive large, technically complex projects or multiple concurrent medium-sized initiatives that span teams, taking responsibility for outcomes rather than just execution.
