Senior Data Platform Engineer

Join APrime Technology and experience the thrill of building mission-critical systems for both  early startups going from 0 to 1 and high-growth startups who’ve found product market fit and are gearing up for enterprise scale. From AI-first companies revolutionizing their industries to B2B SaaS platforms serving Fortune 500 enterprises, every quarter at APrime Technology offers a new opportunity.

APrime is a boutique, engineering-led technology consultancy built by and for experienced technologists. We specialize in designing domain-driven software solutions that solve the most complex, high-stakes problems facing our clients—typically fast-moving disruptors in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, fintech, edtech, govtech, enterprise SaaS, and AI/ML-first products. Our projects live at the intersection of distributed cloud systems, big data, applied AI/ML, thoughtful software design, and first class customer service. We’ve been providing forward deployed engineering as a service to venture backed startups for over 5 years.

As a Data Platform Engineer at APrime, you'll be the architect and builder who transforms ambitious startup visions into scalable reality. You're T-shaped—with deep expertise in data engineering and the versatility to tackle any backend challenge. One quarter you might be building a real-time streaming platform processing billions of events for an AI data management startup; the next, you're architecting a usage-based billing system handling millions in revenue for a DevTools unicorn.

This role is for technologists who see ambiguity as opportunity, who ship code daily, and who get absorbed into each startup's mission as if it were their own.

Must-Haves

• 6+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated expertise in both data engineering and backend development
• Proven track record of building data platforms from scratch at terabyte scale or larger
• Strong expertise in SQL and data modeling, with deep understanding of performance optimization and query tuning
• High agency mindset: You default to action, see ambiguity as opportunity, and take ownership without being asked
• Exceptional communication skills: You can explain complex technical concepts to founders, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and mentor junior engineers
• Production systems experience: You've built and maintained systems that real businesses depend on, handling real money and real user data
• Rapid shipping velocity: You ship code daily and have launched multiple products or major features quarterly
• Cloud platform expertise with at least one major provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) including storage, compute, and managed data services
• Experience with modern data warehouse solutions (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and a foundational understanding of related concepts, such as CDC, schema evolution, and table partitioning

Experience That Makes You Stand Out

• Streaming data expertise: You've built and operated real-time data pipelines using Kafka, Pulsar, or similar streaming platforms
• Infrastructure as Code: Proficiency with Terraform, Pulumi, or similar tools for managing data infrastructure
• Data governance experience: You've implemented data quality monitoring, lineage tracking, and privacy compliance frameworks
• Performance optimization: Track record of optimizing data pipelines and queries for both cost and performance at scale
• Open source contributions: Active participation in data engineering open source projects or communities
• Startup environment: Experience building data systems in fast-growing companies where requirements change rapidly

• A finisher: You don't just start projects—you see them through to production and beyond
• Customer-obsessed: You absorb yourself into each startup's mission, caring deeply about their success
• Always learning: You stay current with emerging technologies while bringing battle-tested wisdom
• Pride in craft: You write clean, maintainable code and build systems that last
• Comfortable with pressure: You thrive in high-stakes, time-sensitive environments

• An AI-powered teacher’s assistant for small-group learning sessions in K12 classrooms, leveraging multi-modal agentic systems to orchestrate real-time student-teacher interactions in a live video conference platform.
• A scalable data and reporting platform for a category-leading usage-based billing provider serving customers like OpenAI, Databricks, and Confluent.
• RAG pipeline components for a highly responsive conversational AI agent using leading-edge technologies in the vector storage, prompt optimization, and agent orchestration space
• Data lakehouse infrastructure for a devtools and cloud infrastructure platform that stores and processes 100’s of terabytes of data monthly and powers BI and billing-related use cases across the entire organization
• Data pipelines and workflow automation for a quantitative asset manager leveraging machine learning for complex portfolio construction logic.
• A financial and healthcare transaction processing engine that powers complex real time healthcare and corporate benefits reimbursement logic for a B2B SaaS Healthtech company

• Variety at velocity: Work with 2-4 different startups annually, each with unique technical challenges
• Direct impact: Your code directly influences the trajectory of venture-backed companies
• Learn from the best: Collaborate with founders and engineers with world class pedigree
• Stay cutting-edge: Work with the latest technologies as our clients push technical boundaries
• High-trust environment: We hire the best and give you the autonomy to do your best work
• Solve Complex Problems: Work on data challenges at the cutting edge of scale, building systems that process data volumes most engineers never encounter

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive base salary of 180k, up to 90k bonus.
  • Generous incentive and bonus plans, including individual and company performance bonuses and “billable hour” bonuses that combined can total up to 50% of base pay
  • Additional revenue share bonuses for customer referrals and candidate referral bonuses. These are paid per referral and there are no caps. 
• Access to equity in APrime’s portfolio of startup client companies via a special purpose vehicle.
• 401k offering with employer match of 100% for contributions up to 6% of annual base salary
• Time Off and Leave:
  • Unlimited Paid Vacation and Sick Days, subject to company guidelines, and 12 paid company holidays
  • Paid and unpaid parental leave benefits
• Health Insurance benefits, including Medical, Dental, Vision and Short Term Disability
  • APrime offers several top-tier PPO health plan options (e.g. Platinum, Gold) provided by United Healthcare, and currently covers 90% of employee and dependent premiums
  • APrime offers Dental and Vision coverage through Beam, and covers 90% of employee and dependents’ premiums
  • APrime fully covers Short Term Disability premiums