Senior Data Engineer

OpenRouter

full-time

Posted on: 9/25/2025

Origin: • 🇺🇸 United States

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💰 $175,000 - $200,000 per year

Senior

ETLGoogle Cloud PlatformKafkaPostgresPythonSQLTerraform

About the role

Architect, build, and own end-to-end data platform and warehousing for OpenRouter's LLM marketplace.
Stand up central analytics store: define schemas, partitioning, retention, and performance strategies for scale; establish data contracts and documentation.
Build, operate, and monitor robust ETL/ELT pipelines with CDC and batch/stream ingestion; ensure idempotency, safe backfills, and predictable reprocessing.
Design and ship customer data products and metrics (latency, throughput, error rates, reliability/SLOs, cost) with handling for late/duplicate events.
Build secure, multi-tenant datasets and APIs; enforce isolation with row/column-level security, access controls, and privacy guardrails.
Take data features from concept to production: design, implement, backfill/migrate, document, and support.

4+ years as a Data Engineer (or similar), including owning production pipelines and a modern data warehouse (Clickhouse, Snowflake, Databricks, etc)
Expert SQL and Python with deep experience with ETL/ELT design, data modeling, and performance tuning.
Experience building end-to-end data infrastructure: storage, compute, networking, orchestration, CI/CD for data, monitoring/alerting, and cost management.
Excellent communicator who can self-manage, set expectations, and partner across functions while working asynchronously.
Customer-obsessed and product-minded, starting from the user problem and shipping pragmatically to deliver value fast.
Biased to action, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to prioritize for impact; default to simple, reliable solutions and iterate quickly.
Bonus: Experience as the first/early data hire building 0 to 1.
Bonus: Direct experience with Clickhouse, Postgres, GCP, or Terraform.
Bonus: Experience standing up event streaming platforms (e.g. Kafka, Pub/Sub).
Bonus: Experience with database privacy/compliance standards (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR/CCPA).