Staff Engineer, Data Engineering

Job Description

Role title:
Staff Engineer, Data Platform  Salary range: $130,000 - $180,000 USD

Location:

Chicago-based Hub or fully remote  The opportunity  Applied engineers the platforms, data, and intelligent systems moving insurance forward. The work runs in production across agencies and carriers, where quality, speed, reliability, and sound technical judgment matter. In this role, you will lead architecture and technical decision-making across Applied’s customer-facing data platform.  This newly created individual contributor role reports directly to the leader of Data and Analytics and serves as the senior engineering lead across Data Lake, Data Engineering, Analytics & Visualization, and Data Science.

You will help modernize the platform supporting internal products and customers, raise engineering standards, and remain hands-on when the work calls for it. You will influence how data moves from its source through ingestion, preparation, visualization, and consumption by Applied products, AI solutions, and customers.  What you’ll own  Lead architecture and technical decision-making across the end-to-end data lifecycle, from source ingestion and streaming through preparation, visualization, and consumption by products, AI solutions, and customers Drive modern engineering approaches through proofs of concept, technology evaluation, and reimagining existing solutions when a more scalable or efficient path is available Improve the scalability, reliability, accuracy, completeness, and observability of data flowing into and through the Data Lake Guide and contribute to major initiatives, including reducing streaming latency, strengthening observability across more than 4,000 agency GCP projects, and modernizing database architecture away from SQL Server Partner with Software Engineering, Data Engineering, BI Engineering, Data Science, product teams, and senior leadership to resolve difficult technical problems and align teams around sound platform decisions Remain hands-on by designing, prototyping, troubleshooting, reviewing code, and contributing directly to implementation when needed Mentor engineers and build a culture of strong software engineering practices, experimentation, platform thinking, AI-enabled work, and shared technical ownership What you’ll bring  8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a track record of strong technical impact Deep data-focused software engineering experience, with the ability to reason across ingestion, streaming, storage, transformation, visualization, and consumption Strong cloud data platform experience in Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure, including architecture and production problem-solving at scale Experience designing or operating data lake and streaming systems, with practical knowledge of data accuracy, stability, availability, and performance Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the software development lifecycle, source control, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, and production operations Hands-on programming experience with Python, Go, or comparable languages, plus strong SQL and data architecture fundamentals A track record of influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct reporting authority while balancing strategic guidance with direct technical contribution Experience leading complex platform design or migration decisions and communicating tradeoffs clearly to technical and business stakeholders, or equivalent practical experience What could set you apart  Production experience with GCP technologies such as Big Query, Dataflow or Apache Beam, Pub/Sub, AlloyDB or Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, and Redis

Experience with change data capture tooling such as Debezium or an…