
Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform
Zocdoc
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: New York • United States
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Salary
💰 $180,000 - $275,000 per year
Job Level
About the role
- Defining and evolving data contract standards across the company, including schema enforcement, versioning, and validation patterns.
- Designing interoperable ingestion and publishing frameworks that enable upstream producers (e.g., product engineering teams) to integrate seamlessly with the data platform.
- Building and standardizing APIs, libraries, or SDKs that simplify event logging, schema validation, and contract compliance.
- Establishing best practices for schema registry usage and distributed schema validation across streaming and batch systems (e.g., Kafka-based systems).
- Designing clear patterns for:
- When to use the data lake vs. the warehouse
- How curated layers are exposed
- How downstream consumers access data safely
- Leading reverse ETL and activation architecture to support operational use cases.
- Defining and enforcing access control, governance, and compliance standards (e.g., PHI/PII handling, DEID boundaries, RBAC).
- Partnering with Product Engineering, Security, Compliance, Analytics Engineering, and Infrastructure to align on standards and long-term direction.
- Mentoring engineers and influencing engineering culture around data quality, ownership, and contracts.
- Driving adoption of AI-assisted development practices (e.g., cloud-based coding environments, internal AI tooling, or agentic workflows) to accelerate platform delivery.
- Designing guardrails for AI access to data systems, including scoped permissions, auditing, and compliance-aware controls.
- Partnering with product and AI teams to ensure our data contracts, schemas, and curated layers are AI-consumable and safe by default.
- Evaluating how internal data platform assets can power AI use cases and intelligent automation across the company.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or backend platform development.
- Demonstrated experience designing data contracts, schema governance, or producer/consumer standards at scale.
- Strong expertise in Python and SQL, with hands-on experience building scalable data frameworks.
- Experience with distributed data systems such as Spark (Databricks or EMR) and modern lakehouse architectures (Delta Lake / Iceberg).
- Experience with data warehouses such as Snowflake and strong understanding of performance and access patterns.
- Familiarity with schema registry systems and schema evolution in streaming systems (e.g., Kafka).
- Experience building APIs, shared libraries, or platform services adopted by multiple teams.
- Strong understanding of access control, RBAC, and compliance constraints in regulated environments.
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional architectural initiatives across product, analytics, and infrastructure teams.
- Clear communication skills and a track record of influencing standards across an organization.
- Experience working with AI-assisted development tools or cloud-based coding environments (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, internal code generation frameworks, or similar systems).
- Strong understanding of governance considerations for GenAI systems, including access control, prompt safety, sensitive data handling, and auditability.
- Perspective on how structured data models and contracts improve AI reliability and downstream automation.
Benefits
- Flexible, hybrid work environment at our convenient Soho location
- Unlimited Vacation
- 100% paid employee health benefit options (including medical, dental, and vision)
- Commuter Benefits
- 401(k) with employer funded match
- Corporate wellness program with Wellhub
- Sabbatical leave (for employees with 5+ years of service)
- Competitive paid parental leave and fertility/family planning reimbursement
- Cell phone reimbursement
- Catered lunch everyday along with beverages and snacks
- Employee Resource Groups and ZocClubs to promote shared community and belonging
- Great Place to Work Certified
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
PythonSQLdata contractsschema governancedistributed data systemsSparkdata warehousesAPIsRBACAI-assisted development
Soft Skills
clear communicationmentoringinfluencing standardscross-functional leadership