Staff Data Engineer

About Checkr
Checkr is building the data platform to power safe and fair decisions. Over 140,000 companies and millions of people rely on Checkr for AI verification in the moments that matter most: getting a new job, a new place to live, a car ride, childcare, even a date. Customers include Uber, Pennymac, Airbnb, Doordash, Amazon, and Anthropic.

A career at Checkr means collaborating with brilliant minds, disrupting an industry, and opening channels of employment to often overlooked candidates. Checkr is recognized on Forbes Cloud 100 2025 List and is a Y Combinator 2024 Breakthrough Company.

As a Staff Data Engineer on the People Data team, you'll help build and evolve the centralized platform that powers every Checkr product. This platform stores and serves the identity and people records that underpin Checkr's Workforce, Mortgage, Tenant, Trust, and Personal products, making it foundational to the company's AI-powered verification platform and every high-stakes decision our customers make.

In this role, you'll own the core services, data pipelines, and architecture that keep this platform scalable, reliable, and ready for the next generation of Checkr products. You'll solve complex distributed systems and data engineering challenges while influencing the technical direction of one of the company's most critical platforms.

What you´ll do:

• Architect, design, lead, and build an end-to-end, performant, reliable, scalable data platform.
• Work as an independent contributor: solve problems and deliver high-quality solutions with minimal oversight and strong ownership.
• Mentor and guide junior engineers to deliver complex, next-generation features.
• Bring a customer-centric, product-oriented mindset.  Collaborate with customers and internal stakeholders to resolve product ambiguities and ship features that solve real customer problems.
• Partner with engineering, product, design, and other stakeholders to design and architect new features.
• Experimentation mindset: autonomy and empowerment to validate a customer need, get team buy-in, and ship a rapid MVP.
• Quality mindset: you treat quality as a non-negotiable part of your software deliverables.
• Analytical mindset: instrument and deploy new product experiments with a data-driven approach.
• Monitor, triage, and resolve production issues for the team's services.
• Create and maintain data pipelines and foundational datasets to support product and business needs.

What You Bring:

• 10+ years designing, implementing, and delivering highly scalable, performant data platforms.
• Experience building large-scale data processing pipelines using ETL/ELT, batch, and stream processing.
• Expert-level proficiency in PySpark, Python, and SQL.
• Expertise in data modeling, relational databases, and NoSQL data stores (e.g., MongoDB).
• Experience with big data technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Iceberg, data lakes, and the AWS stack (EKS, EMR, Serverless, Glue, Athena, S3, etc.).
• Knowledge of security best practices and data privacy concerns.
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
• Nice to have: experience or knowledge of data processing platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake.
• An A-player mindset with a strong bias for action: you raise the bar, move with urgency, stay resilient through ambiguity, and take ownership to deliver meaningful outcomes.

What We Offer

• A collaborative and fast-moving environment
• Be part of an international company based in the United States
• $3,000 USD per year learning and development reimbursement allowance
• Competitive compensation and opportunity for professional and personal advancement
• 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents
• Additional vacation benefits of 5 extra days and flexibility to take time off

At Checkr, we believe a hybrid work environment strengthens collaboration, drives innovation, and encourages connection. Our hub locations are Denver, CO; San Francisco, CA; Nashville, TN; and Santiago, Chile. Individuals are expected to work from the office 3+ days a week. In-office perks are provided, such as lunch five times a week, a commuter stipend, and an abundance of snacks and beverages.

Equal Employment Opportunities at Checkr

Checkr is committed to hiring talented and qualified individuals with diverse backgrounds for all of its tech, non-tech, and leadership roles. Checkr believes that the gathering and celebration of unique backgrounds, qualities, and cultures enriches the workplace.   

Checkr also welcomes the opportunity to consider qualified applicants with prior arrest or conviction records. Checkr’s commitment to diversity extends to hiring talented individuals in spite of a prior criminal history in accordance with local, state, and/or federal laws, including the San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance.

*Legitimate Checkr emails will always include our official domain name after the @ symbol (e.g., name@checkr.com or name@ext.checkr.com).