Lead Data Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote - Nationwide, United States. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S.; employment visa sponsorship, including CPT/OPT, is not available. Reliable wired high-speed internet and a suitable home workspace are required.

Base salary: $131,700–$190,950 per year, with potential bonus participation.

Company

hirify.global provides financial services focused on helping customers achieve financial freedom and supports flexible career development, well-being, work-life balance, inclusion, and community volunteering.

What you will do

• Lead the design and implementation of advanced data pipelines, ingestion frameworks, and real-time streaming solutions.
• Build and optimize scalable Kafka producers and consumers using Python, Java, Go, or Scala for sub-second latency and high availability.
• Configure CDC solutions with Debezium, AWS DMS, or Qlik Replicate across relational and NoSQL systems into Kafka topics.
• Develop stream-processing solutions with Flink, Spark Streaming, Kafka Streams, or dbt-mesh architectures.
• Implement schema evolution, data contracts, monitoring, alerting, consumer offset management, partition rebalancing, and dead-letter queues.
• Lead complex initiatives, guide architecture decisions, mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and improve automation and platform capabilities.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or an equivalent combination of training and experience.
• 6–8+ years of data engineering experience with enterprise-scale platforms, including 6–8+ years of hands-on experience with Kafka, Confluent Cloud, AWS Kinesis, or Apache Pulsar.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, PySpark, and SQL; production experience with Python, Java, Scala, or Go and Flink, Kafka Streams, or Spark Structured Streaming.
• Strong AWS and modern data platform experience, including CDC tools such as Debezium and Kafka Connect and log-based replication using Oracle Redo, PostgreSQL WAL, or MySQL binlog.
• Experience integrating streaming events with Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Snowflake, or BigQuery.
• Solid foundation in Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD automation, event-driven microservices, data contracts, schema management, data modeling, ETL/ELT, and data warehousing.
• Experience leading technical initiatives and mentoring engineers, with strong problem-solving and communication skills.
• Experience working in Agile environments.

Nice to have

• Experience integrating AI agents to self-heal pipeline failures, resolve schema drift, and extract structured data from unstructured event streams.
• Experience designing fallback strategies with automated dead-letter reprocessing, circuit breakers, and deterministic idempotency keys.
• Experience with domain-driven event design, Event Sourcing, CQRS, enterprise event contracts, governance, and schema lifecycle versioning with backward and forward compatibility.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work environment with support for career mobility, purpose, well-being, work-life balance, inclusion, and volunteering.
• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• 401(k) plan with matching contributions of up to 6%, financial advisory services, and potential discretionary contributions.
• Tuition reimbursement of up to $5,250 per year.
• Paid time off upon hire, ten paid company holidays, three floating holidays, paid volunteer time, parental leave, disability coverage, and FMLA programs.
• Business Resource Groups supporting inclusion and collaboration.