Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform Lead

Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform Lead

Kipsu is a growth stage Minneapolis-based technology company that has grown to over 130 employees. At Kipsu, we help service professionals Meet the Moment by partnering with some of the

largest hospitality and healthcare brands in the world. Our best-in-class technology enables organizations around the globe to better serve their customers through streamlined messaging, data-driven performance metrics, sentiment analysis and workflow management. As one of the Twin Cities' leading tech companies, Kipsu has cultivated a reputation for a strong company culture and is consistently recognized by the Star Tribune as a Top Workplace.

THE OPPORTUNITY

We are investing heavily in building a modern, scalable data platform that transforms data from a reporting function into a core product capability. Our vision is to enable internal teams and customers alike to access trusted, consistent, and actionable data without friction-powering everything from operational decision-making to new, monetizable data products.

As our Data Platform Lead, you will take ownership of building and evolving our data platform end-to-end. You'll operate as a hands-on technical leader-working directly in pipelines, data models, and infrastructure while driving the day-to-day progress of the platform.

You'll partner closely with the CTO and a small team of Data Engineers to turn vision into working systems, making pragmatic decisions and delivering real value incrementally. This is not an advisory or purely architectural role. You'll be expected to drive execution, remove blockers, and ship meaningful improvements continuously. You'll also play a role in ensuring our production data systems are performant and reliable, bridging the gap between transactional systems and our analytical platform.

You'll thrive in this role if you enjoy building systems from the ground up, bringing structure to ambiguity, and leading through action.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

* Build and evolve Kipsu's data platform hands-on, including pipelines, transformations, and core data models

* Drive day-to-day execution of the data platform roadmap, ensuring steady progress and delivery of real outcomes

* Act as manager for the Data Platform team, leading a small team (currently one) of Data Engineers to design, implement, and ship scalable, reliable data pipelines

* Work directly in the stack-writing transformations, improving data models, and contributing to infrastructure as needed

* Establish and iterate on standards for modeling, testing, and observability through hands-on implementation

* Develop repeatable patterns for ingestion, transformation, and metric definition

* Guide and review new data sources, schema changes, and metric designs

* Support and optimize production data systems (MySQL, Postgre

SQL) in collaboration with Platform Engineering, assisting with database reliability and scalability, including replication and performance tuning

* Contribute to operational best practices for production data systems, ensuring consistency between application databases and downstream analytics pipelines

* Contribute to technical decision-making around tools, frameworks, and platform evolution (e.g., dbt, warehouse, orchestration, semantic layer)

* Act as the technical lead for the data platform, driving priorities forward and ensuring meaningful progress

* Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to ensure data considerations are embedded in feature design and delivery

* Support the transition from ad hoc reporting to a product-minded analytics platform

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

* 5+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, or Data Platform Architecture

* Strong experience with modern data stack tools (we use dbt, Redshift, Cube, Elementary, Data Hub, etc.)

* Experience designing and implementing data models, transformation pipelines, and analytics layers

* Comfort working across the stack, including infrastructure and cloud environments (we use AWS)

* Experience with data quality, testing frameworks, and observability tooling

* Familiarity with operating and tuning relational databases (MySQL, Postgre

SQL) in production…