Palo Alto, CA

Salary
$110,000–$180,000from the description
Posted
Jul 27, 2026
Location
Palo Alto, CA
Last confirmed open
Jul 29, 2026

What this job asks for AI summary

A data engineering role at a small national-security-focused startup in Palo Alto, building and maintaining data pipelines, repositories, and platforms that feed analytics dashboards and machine learning workflows. The work spans ingestion, transformation, and aggregation across relational and NoSQL stores, with cross-functional collaboration alongside analysts, data scientists, and developers. Suited to a generalist data engineer comfortable owning infrastructure end-to-end in a fast-moving environment.

Mid level · 3+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time

Must have (7)
PythonPandasNumPySQLETL pipelinesAWS, Azure or GCPMySQL, MongoDB, SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL or Hbase
Nice to have (5)
Shell scriptingJavaScalaTensorFlow or scikit-learnAPIs

“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.

Posted 3 times — it's one opening, so apply once.

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 150 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 80–240

Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.

What won't set you apart
Python88%Pandas72%SQL72%NumPy62%MySQL40%

Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.

What the occupation pays Median $189,150 (middle half $152,859–$224,286). This posting is about at that midpoint.

Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 29, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.

Why we read it this way (6)

The database/storage requirement lists many interchangeable options (MySQL, MongoDB, SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, HBase, DynamoDB) — the JD requires experience with at least one; MySQL is used as the primary name with the others as alternatives.

AWS is listed under required qualifications as 'AWS/cloud technologies' with no specific cloud named as mandatory; Azure and GCP are listed as alternatives since any major cloud platform appears acceptable.

Machine learning frameworks (TensorFlow, Scikit-Learn) appear in the required qualifications section but are framed with 'familiarity with', softening them to preferred.

The degree requirement accepts equivalent experience in lieu of a Bachelor's degree, so no minimum degree is flagged as a hard gate.

The role is on-site at Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto; no remote option is mentioned.

SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role centers on architecting data repositories and building pipelines (15-1243 Database Architects), but the volume of general software/scripting development work also makes 15-1252 Software Developers a reasonable fit.

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