Staff Engineer, Data Platform (AI)

Location: Chicago-based hub or fully remote in the United States.

Salary: $130,000–$180,000 USD annually.

Company

hirify.global builds platforms, data, and intelligent systems connecting insurance agencies and carriers across the insurance lifecycle.

What you will do

• Lead architecture and technical decisions across the complete data lifecycle, from source ingestion and streaming through preparation, visualization, and consumption by products, AI solutions, and customers.
• Improve the scalability, reliability, accuracy, completeness, and observability of data flowing into and through the Data Lake.
• Guide major initiatives such as reducing streaming latency, strengthening observability across more than 4,000 agency GCP projects, and modernizing database architecture away from SQL Server.
• Drive proofs of concept, technology evaluation, scalable engineering approaches, and modernization of existing solutions.
• Partner with Software Engineering, Data Engineering, BI Engineering, Data Science, product teams, and senior leadership to resolve complex technical problems and align platform decisions.
• Remain hands-on through design, prototyping, troubleshooting, code review, implementation, and mentoring engineers.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a record of strong technical impact.
• Deep data-focused software engineering experience across ingestion, streaming, storage, transformation, visualization, and consumption.
• Strong cloud data platform experience with Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure, including architecture and production problem-solving at scale.
• Experience designing or operating data lake and streaming systems, with practical knowledge of data accuracy, stability, availability, and performance.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals covering the software development lifecycle, source control, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, and production operations.
• Hands-on programming experience with Python, Go, or comparable languages, plus strong SQL and data architecture fundamentals.
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct reporting authority while balancing strategic guidance with direct technical contribution.
• Experience leading complex platform design or migration decisions and communicating tradeoffs clearly to technical and business stakeholders, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Production experience with GCP technologies including BigQuery, Dataflow or Apache Beam, Pub/Sub, AlloyDB or Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, and Redis.
• Experience with change data capture tools such as Debezium or an equivalent technology.
• Experience applying AI or machine learning within data platforms or using AI and automation to accelerate engineering work.
• Experience with large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS data platforms, particularly in insurance or another regulated industry.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems, leading low-disruption migrations, and creating engineering standards adopted by teams.
• An entrepreneurial approach involving idea testing, proofs of concept, challenging assumptions, and starting fresh when justified.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on products and services supporting agencies, carriers, and teammates across the insurance lifecycle.
• Own meaningful technical decisions with visibility into customer needs and business priorities.
• Access learning opportunities, cross-functional exposure, stretch work, and growth through expanded scope.
• Collaborate with people who bring expertise, curiosity, care, and shared accountability.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus holiday and vacation time.
• Health and wellness days and a day off for your birthday.

Hiring process

• Employment is contingent on successful completion of applicable background checks and verification steps.
• Recruitment may use AI-enabled tools for application organization, scheduling, and workflow administration, with human review in hiring decisions.