Senior Data Engineer
Alpaca
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Jul 26, 2026
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Jul 27, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role focused on designing and operating a large-scale data platform that handles hundreds of millions of events per day across financial transactions, customer data, API logs, and third-party systems. Day-to-day work spans lakehouse infrastructure (Apache Iceberg), streaming and CDC ingestion pipelines, distributed query engines, orchestration, and BI tooling, all running on Kubernetes and GCP with infrastructure managed through Terraform and Ansible. Best suited to an experienced data engineer comfortable owning platform reliability end-to-end in a fully remote, fast-moving environment.
Senior level · 5+ years · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 70 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database architects). range 20–130
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $142,568 (middle half $111,775–$173,013).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role is fully remote with no stated primary location; no CBSA or state has been assigned.
SOC classification is a genuine toss-up: the role designs and builds a data lakehouse platform (pipeline architecture, open table formats, distributed query engines → 15-1243 Database Architects) but also writes substantial application code in Python and manages infrastructure-as-code (→ 15-1252 Software Developers). 15-1243 was chosen because the primary deliverable is the data platform architecture and its storage/query layers.
ArgoCD is listed in the Must-Haves with the qualifier 'or equivalents'; alternatives are not enumerated in the posting, so no alternatives were added — the qualifier means the specific tool is interchangeable but the capability is required.
GCP is listed as a hard gate but with 'or related experience with other cloud services'; AWS and Azure are added as alternatives accordingly.
GCS, Cloud Build, Cloud SQL, and Dataproc appear as illustrative examples of GCP data services within the GCP requirement sentence; they are marked preferred rather than individually gated.
The 2+ years sub-requirement (building low-latency platforms at >100M events/day) is a sub-component of the 5+ year overall experience gate and is captured in the overall years minimum at the higher 5-year figure.
No compensation was stated in the posting.
Read the full posting
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