At ClickUp, we're building the future of work: the first truly converged AI workspace unifying tasks, docs, chat, calendar, and enterprise search, all supercharged by context-driven AI. We are an AI-native company. Every team member is expected to leverage AI daily, and we evaluate AI fluency as part of our hiring process. Join us and help redefine what's possible. 🚀
We're looking for a Staff Data Engineer to own the architecture and technical vision of our data platform. This is a high-leverage, high-autonomy role where you'll set the technical bar for the team, drive cross-functional alignment on data infrastructure strategy, and solve our hardest engineering problems. You'll operate across AWS serverless technologies, Snowflake, dbt, and Terraform, but your impact goes well beyond any single tool: you'll shape how we think about reliability, scalability, cost, and developer experience at the platform level.
This role is for someone who doesn't just build great systems, but makes the engineers around them better.
The Role:
- Own the technical architecture of ClickUp's data platform, making design decisions that balance scalability, cost, reliability, and velocity.
- Define and drive the technical roadmap for data infrastructure in partnership with leadership.
- Design systems at scale: build frameworks, abstractions, and patterns that other engineers use daily.
- Lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives spanning data engineering, analytics engineering, data science, and data analytics.
- Drive cost optimization across cloud infrastructure and compute, turning efficiency into a competitive advantage.
- Build and evolve our data pipelines using AWS serverless (Lambda, Fargate, Step Functions, Kinesis, S3, DynamoDB, Aurora), Snowflake, and dbt.
- Establish and champion engineering standards: observability, testing, CI/CD, code review, and documentation practices.
- Design and maintain infrastructure for AI/ML workloads, including LLM frameworks, feature pipelines, training data systems, and model monitoring.
- Mentor senior engineers, provide technical guidance through design reviews, and raise the overall engineering quality of the team.
- Influence org-wide technical decisions and represent data engineering in company-level architecture discussions.
Qualifications:
- Significant professional experience in data engineering or backend/infrastructure engineering, with at least 3 years operating at a senior or staff level.
- Proven track record of owning architecture for data platforms or large-scale distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in AWS cloud services (Lambda, Fargate, Step Functions, S3, Kinesis, DynamoDB, Aurora) and infrastructure as code (Terraform and/or CDK).
- Expert-level SQL and Snowflake (or equivalent cloud data warehouse) knowledge, including performance tuning and cost optimization.
- Strong experience with dbt and modern ELT/ETL patterns at scale.
- Advanced Python skills with emphasis on building reusable libraries, frameworks, and tooling.
- Hands-on experience with orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect) in production environments.
- Experience building data infrastructure for AI/ML: feature stores, training pipelines, embedding pipelines, model serving, or LLM integration.
- Deep understanding of streaming and event-driven architectures (Kinesis, Kafka, or equivalent).
- Mastery of CI/CD, Git workflows, containerization (Docker), and deployment automation.
- Strong communication skills: ability to write technical RFCs, influence without authority, and translate complex trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders.
- Track record of mentoring and growing engineers, with a multiplier mindset.
Desirable
- Experience operating data platforms at high scale (petabyte-level warehouses, millions of events/sec).
- Familiarity with data mesh or data product paradigms.
- Experience with FinOps practices and cloud cost management at scale.
- Prior experience in a technical leadership role without direct reports (staff/principal IC track).
- Contributions to open-source data tools or technical communities.
Unsure if you meet all the qualifications of this job description but are deeply excited about the role? We hire based on ambition, grit, and a passion for improving the way people work. If you think ClickUp is the company for you, we encourage you to apply!
At ClickUp, we assess every candidate based on the potential impact they can have. We hire the best people for the job and support each person’s journey to build their boldest career.
**Equal Opportunity Employer **
ClickUp is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
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