Principal Staff Engineer

Velir is an established mid-sized agency with a top-tier portfolio of clients, ranging from the world’s largest non-profits to Fortune 500 brands. As of 2023, Velir acquired Brooklyn Data Company, a premier data and analytics consultancy focused on leadership, process improvement, implementation, and advanced analytics.

At Velir, we believe people are our greatest asset. Our culture is built on a foundation of trust, collaboration, and continued improvement. We strive for excellence in everything we do, embracing challenges as opportunities for growth. Our success is driven by a shared passion for making a positive impact on our customers, our communities and each other. We are a remote first company that offers competitive pay and excellent benefits.

Overview

Staff Data Engineers are responsible for being interpersonal force multipliers across the organization, augmenting our internal capabilities to effectively manage and leverage client data effectively. Staff Engineers work closely with functional leadership and data solutions team members to understand common client business needs and requirements to identify and develop data engineering solutions to meet those needs. Staff Engineers are technical leadership roles that run parallel to those on the management track. These team members generally do not have direct reports but will often influence and coach less senior team members to successfully upskill them. As senior-level individual contributors, staff engineers may also contribute to similar projects at the senior data engineer level, including recommending and implementing optimal architecture, warehousing, quality assurance, scalability, performance optimization, and security for clients’ needs. 

Because our clients are mostly US-based organizations, we look for the ability to communicate with professional proficiency in English, verbally and in writing.

Responsibilities

Data Engineering Leadership: You are responsible for bridging technical gaps to lead and oversee various data engineering projects for our data solutions engagements. You possess advanced data engineering knowledge and expertise, and your assignments, projects, and programs are of significant scope and/or complexity where effective decision-making requires navigating ambiguous or uncertain conditions. 
• Partners closely with the data solutions team and functional managers/directors during the client discovery process to understand the organization and specifically what the business is trying to achieve so that we can identify the optimal approach for their needs.
• Mentors and helps others grow in the field of data engineering.
• Consistently demonstrates engineering expertise and is most highly skilled in one or more technical or business domains.
• Represents the organization in local meetups, national and international conferences by speaking or other arrangements.

Cross-Team Collaboration: You are responsible for contributing to alignment across the organization through influence and by translating context across different teams. You have a strong, foundational understanding of 
other Data Team functions, while also being able to translate these concepts for less technical colleagues. 
• Leads, works on and executes inter-disciplinary and cross-functional projects.
• Promotes a positive culture within and across different teams, collaborating with analytics engineers and data analysts on end-to-end client requirements.
• Collaborates with clients and functional managers to plan for engineering needs for a client start / expansion.
• Creates documentation, processes, or templates that helps cross-functional teams solve for common engineering problems.
• Builds a culture where reliability, observability and scalability are part of building any new and contributing to existing client systems.

Project Enablement: You are responsible for ensuring that large and/or more complex engineering projects are delivered in alignment with the appropriate business outcomes. As a senior+ member of the Data Engineering 
function, you serve as a mentor to data solutions team members, data engineering managers, and other data engineers, and may be embedded on a client team to unblock and upskill them.
• Asks insightful questions to gather requirements and align expectations on what success looks like for a workstream / project.
• Leads in scoping and executing most impactful work for cross-functional teams on the client.
• Proactively works to align effort across multiple functions to maximize client impact.
• Demonstrates and promotes a culture of technical documentation through design docs and knowledge sharing across the company.

Skills & Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Data Engineer or related role, with a focus on designing and developing data pipelines. 
• Strong programming skills in Python and SQL. Experience with Scala and Rust is a plus but not required. 
• Deep knowledge of data warehousing and ETL/ELT processes. 
• Intermediate / expert proficiency with common data integration / orchestration platforms (e.g., Fivetran, Azure Data Factory, Apache Airflow) 
• Deep experience with at least one cloud data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or similar). 
• Experience with streaming solutions such as Spark Streaming, Kafka, or Flink is desirable but not required. 
• Strong experience with at least one cloud platform such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. 
• Familiarity with machine learning operations (MLOps) techniques and platforms is a plus but not required. 
• Experience mentoring and advising other engineers.
• Ability to define, explain, and sell long-term vision for technical architecture, technical approaches / procedures, etc. 
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. 

Physical Requirements

• Frequent sitting at a desk performing work on a computer
• Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions

Compensation Range: $155,000 - $175,000 annually

Please note that compensation packages are finalized after the interview process is concluded. We use a competency-based approach to base pay, which means it is based on the competencies and skills demonstrated for this role.

Core Company Values

• Take the Long View - Ensure the company is built to last
• Be Courageous - Make the right decisions even when they aren't the easiest decisions
• Be Genuine - Bring honesty and authenticity to all that you do
• Work with Focus + Passion - Display purpose and pride in your work and never stop learning

As an equal opportunity employer, we are firmly committing to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our hiring efforts. We recognize that we need team members from all backgrounds and experiences to successfully shape a positive employee experience as well as deliver our product and service solutions. To that end, we actively seek candidates who can bring diverse experiences and backgrounds to our team. We know that complex factors and systemic bias can get in the way of us meeting strong candidates, so please don't hesitate to apply even if you're not 100% sure.

At this time, Velir does not sponsor candidates and unfortunately cannot accept those on OPT or CPT.