Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform
About The Position
Apella is applying computer vision and machine learning to improve the standard of care in the most critical aspect of healthcare: surgery. We build applications to enable surgeons, nurses, and hospital administrators to deliver the highest quality care. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform to help evolve and operate our modern cloud data platform. You’ll build and maintain a BigQuery data warehouse with batch pipelines powered by dbt + Dagster, while also expanding a real-time streaming platform consisting of Kafka topics and Flink jobs (FlinkSQL) to process data as it arrives. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys designing reliable data systems end-to-end: modeling and transforming data, orchestrating pipelines, enabling self-serve analytics, and ensuring the platform is observable, performant, and cost-effective.
Requirements
- Strong proficiency in SQL (advanced querying, performance considerations, data modeling).
- Hands-on experience with dbt (models, tests, sources, macros, snapshots, incremental strategies).
- Experience with batch orchestration tooling Dagster/Airflow (assets/jobs, schedules/sensors, partitioning, backfills, observability).
- Proficiency in Python for data engineering tasks (pipeline glue code, libraries, tooling, testing).
- Deep familiarity with BigQuery or equivalent cloud native data warehouse tooling (partitioning/clustering, cost/performance optimization, best practices).
- Solid experience with GCP (AWS/Azure) infrastructure (core services, IAM, security practices, deployments/automation).
- Strong engineering fundamentals: version control, testing, code review, documentation, and operational ownership.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with data quality tooling and patterns (e.g., anomaly detection, expectation-based testing, lineage).
- Experience designing semantic layers or metrics layers for analytics.
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures, schema registries, CDC patterns, and schema evolution strategies.
- Experience building or maintaining streaming data pipelines with Kafka and Apache Flink, including FlinkSQL.
- Experience with IaC (e.g., Terraform) and CI/CD for data platforms.
- Understanding of privacy/security controls (PII handling, access controls, auditability).
Responsibilities
- Build and extend batch pipelines using dbt for transformations and Dagster for orchestration, scheduling, and asset-driven lineage.
- Develop and optimize BigQuery data models (dimensional, wide-table, or domain-oriented) to support analytics, experimentation, and reporting use cases.
- Advance real-time streaming capabilities by implementing and maintaining Kafka/PubSub + Flink pipelines, primarily using FlinkSQL, to deliver low-latency datasets and event-derived metrics.
- Design data platform standards: SDLC, naming conventions, modeling patterns, incremental strategies, schema evolution approaches, and best practices for batch + streaming including CI/CD and testing.
- Improve reliability and observability by implementing monitoring, alerting, and SLAs/SLOs for pipelines and data quality.
- Partner with analytics, product, and engineering teams to onboard new data sources, define contracts, and deliver trusted datasets.
- Own platform operations including performance tuning, data quality, cost optimization, and scaling across both warehouse and streaming systems.
- Design a unified serving layer architecture that cleanly exposes consistent, trusted datasets across both batch and streaming systems.
- Establishing strong data governance, reliability standards, and observability practices.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and stock options
- Flexible vacation policy and a culture that values time for rest and recharging
- Remote-first work environment with unique virtual and in-person events to foster team connection
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance—we're a healthcare company that prioritizes your health
- 16 weeks of parental leave for all parents
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
