The Data Engineer, Data Platform will build and operate the data capabilities that help AHEAD teams access trusted, usable, and well-managed information. This hands-on role will develop and support production ingestion pipelines, transformations, data models, and reusable data products, with an emphasis on Snowflake, dbt, SQL, and Python.
The role will support data coming from enterprise applications and services, including Salesforce, NetSuite, AHEAD applications, and approved APIs. The Data Engineer will make data available for analytics, applications, and automation through consistent engineering patterns, appropriate access controls, and dependable operational practices. The team uses AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate delivery while maintaining security and code quality.
Working under the Director, Data Platform and alongside other data engineers, this role will partner with Analytics, source-system owners, and data consumers to implement requirements and deliver maintainable solutions through production support.
Duties/Responsibilities
Build, maintain, and improve batch and incremental data ingestion pipelines to meet agreed freshness needs, including API pagination and rate limits, retries, schema changes, deletes, and replay or backfill without duplicating data.
Use approved AI-assisted development tools for coding, testing, documentation, and troubleshooting; protect sensitive data and credentials, and validate generated output through testing, engineering judgment, and peer review.
Evaluate supported connectors, source-provided shares, file delivery, and custom extraction against required coverage, recovery, security, supportability, and operating cost; favor simpler supported approaches where they meet the need.
Develop SQL and Python solutions that collect, validate, transform, and publish data for downstream consumption.
Use Snowflake and dbt to build reliable transformations, incremental models, and reusable datasets that reconcile cross-system identifiers, preserve relevant history, and implement agreed transformation logic. Implement data product standards for technical metadata, schemas, data quality checks, lineage, and freshness monitoring.
Partner with application and Integration Platform teams on ingestion and governed read access; coordinate source-system writes and operational actions with the responsible integration or application owners.
Build automated unit, integration, and data-quality tests covering completeness, freshness, uniqueness, consistency, referential integrity, and reconciliation with source systems; investigate discrepancies before publishing data.
Implement approved access controls with Security, IAM, and data owners, including least-privilege roles, service identities, classification, masking, and row- or column-level controls; test both permitted and denied access.
Build version-controlled deployment processes for code, database changes, and access grants across development, quality assurance, and production environments, including safe cutover and rollback.
Monitor pipeline health, freshness, performance, and failures; troubleshoot root causes, recover failed loads, maintain technical documentation and runbooks, and communicate incidents and downstream impacts.
Optimize Snowflake workloads, queries, transformations, and storage patterns for performance, reliability, and cost discipline.
Partner with Analytics to reuse existing data models and implement agreed transformation logic, keeping shared datasets aligned with Analytics-owned semantic models.
Participate in backlog refinement, estimation, code review, and iterative delivery within a Kanban engineering team; break work into testable increments and communicate dependencies and delivery risks.
Proactively identify and recommend improvements to data architecture, ingestion and transformation patterns, and engineering practices; implement agreed changes to improve reliability, scalability, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
Education and Experience
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
3 or more years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, analytics engineering, or a related technical role.
Professional experience writing production-quality SQL and Python.
Experience independently building, deploying, and supporting production data pipelines, with hands-on orchestration experience covering scheduling, dependency management, monitoring, and failed-run recovery.
Hands-on experience with a cloud data warehouse and a transformation framework; Snowflake and dbt experience is strongly preferred.
Understanding of relational and dimensional data modeling, keys, grain, ELT/ETL patterns, APIs, source-system integration, schema evolution, and historical-change handling.
Experience with software engineering practices including source control, code review, automated testing, and CI/CD.
Experience using AI-assisted development tools effectively, with critical review of generated code and tests.
Understanding of data quality, metadata, lineage, role-based access, privacy, and secure handling of enterprise data, including secrets and service credentials.
Ability to investigate data issues, communicate findings clearly, and work through ambiguity with teammates and stakeholders.
Ability to collaborate effectively with engineers, analysts, source-system owners, security teams, and business stakeholders to implement and support reliable data solutions.
Preferred
Experience with Azure cloud storage, containerized or serverless workloads, and infrastructure as code, such as Terraform.
Experience ingesting data from enterprise applications such as Salesforce or NetSuite using REST or GraphQL APIs.
Familiarity with pipeline migration, observability, data catalogs, lineage tooling, or data quality platforms.
Experience building datasets that support BI reporting or governed application access through APIs.
Experience reconciling customer, product, order, or other business identifiers across systems, including reference data, entity matching, and historical change tracking.
Experience supporting production pipelines or datasets with freshness monitoring, versioning, access controls, and support procedures.
Curiosity about emerging data platform technologies and a practical approach to adopting them.
Physical Requirements
- Ability to safely and successfully perform the essential job functions consistent with the ADA, FMLA, and other federal, state, and local standards, including meeting qualitative and/or quantitative productivity standards.
Ability to maintain regular, punctual attendance consistent with the ADA, FMLA, and other federal, state, and local standards.
Primarily office and computer-based work with standard engineering and collaboration expectations for an enterprise technology role.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Three or more years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, analytics engineering, or a related technical role
- Production-quality SQL and Python experience
- Experience building or supporting data pipelines, transformations, and data models in a cloud data environment
- Experience with Snowflake, dbt, or comparable cloud data warehouse and transformation technologies
- Understanding of data modeling, ELT/ETL patterns, pipeline orchestration, APIs, and source-system integration
- Experience with source control, code review, automated testing, and CI/CD
- Demonstrated active use of AI-assisted software development tools for code generation, testing, documentation, debugging, or review
- Ability to follow an AI software development lifecycle and identify opportunities for cooperating agents to improve delivery
- Understanding of data quality, metadata, lineage, access control, privacy, and secure enterprise data handling
- Ability to investigate data issues, communicate findings, and work through ambiguity
- Ability to collaborate with engineers, analysts, product owners, governance, security, and business stakeholders
- Experience with Azure services, serverless functions, cloud storage, or other cloud-native data engineering capabilities
- Experience with REST or GraphQL APIs and ingestion from Salesforce, Hatch, NetSuite, or similar systems
- Familiarity with orchestration, event-driven processing, observability, data catalogs, lineage tooling, or data quality platforms
- Experience supporting semantic models, MCP-based access, or governed interfaces for analytics, applications, automation, or AI workflows
- Experience with master data, reference data, entity resolution, or shared business definitions across multiple systems
- Experience operating data products with documented ownership, access expectations, quality measures, and support procedures
- Experience using AI agents or agentic workflows for software delivery, data engineering, testing, documentation, or platform operations
- Curiosity about emerging data platform technologies and a practical approach to adoption
AHEAD Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about AHEAD and has not been reviewed or approved by AHEAD.
-
Retirement Support — 401(k) contributions are matched dollar-for-dollar on the first $5,000 each year, with matching made each pay period and immediate 100% vesting. This structure signals above-standard employer support for retirement savings.
-
Affordable Benefits — Medical options include low employee premiums for PPO and HDHP plans, and the HDHP adds employer HSA funding plus a dollar-for-dollar HSA match up to stated amounts. Dental and vision plans list very low per-paycheck costs, helping keep overall healthcare spend manageable.
-
Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — No-cost telemedicine (including virtual mental health when enrolled), free Calm access for the employee and dependents, and an EAP with counseling are included. Company-paid life and disability plus voluntary protections (legal/ID, pet insurance) and other extras round out a comprehensive set of supports.
AHEAD Insights
What We Do
AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together cloud infrastructure, intelligent operations, and modern applications, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.









