Senior Data Engineer - Forward Deployed
About The Position
Dataro is an ethically minded SaaS startup using machine learning to help not-for-profits raise more money and do more good. Our platform powers fundraising for organizations across the world, helping them run smarter campaigns and improve donor engagement using data-driven insights. Every day we ingest and process hundreds of millions of records from a wide range of fundraising and CRM systems. This data underpins our predictive modeling and analytics products. As we expand in the United States, we're looking for an exceptional engineer who is also an excellent communicator - someone who can work directly with customers, solve technical problems end-to-end, and act as the bridge between clients and our Sydney-based engineering team. As a Senior Software Engineer - Forward Deployed, you will work closely with customers throughout their entire Dataro journey - from integration design and onboarding through to ongoing optimization over multi-year engagements. You will serve as both a technical advisor and a hands-on engineer, building data integrations, diagnosing issues, and shaping client solutions. You will be one of the first technical hires in the US, so this role requires independence, strong ownership, and the ability to operate confidently in ambiguous situations. If you enjoy client interaction as much as writing great code, this role offers a unique opportunity to have direct impact in both engineering and customer outcomes.
Requirements
- 5+ years experience building and supporting real-world data pipelines, including deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting
- Extremely strong SQL skills - comfortable working with large, complex datasets
- Extremely strong Python skills, with experience writing production-grade code
- Understanding of databases, query optimization, and general software engineering practices
- Experience with AWS services (EC2, Batch, Lambda, S3, Athena)
- Proven experience with Git, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing
- Excellent communication skills - comfortable leading customer calls, translating technical topics, and managing expectations
- Ability to work independently and make good decisions with limited oversight
Nice To Haves
- Experience in the fundraising or non-profit sector
- West Coast / Pacific Time Zone
- Experience working in startups or forward-deployed/consulting-style engineering roles
- Experience with DuckDB or AWS Athena
Responsibilities
- Work directly with customers to understand their systems, data structures, and fundraising workflows
- Act as a bridge between clients, engineering, sales, and customer success - helping translate requirements into solutions
- Develop and maintain integrations across dozens of fundraising, CRM, and adjacent platforms
- Build, extend, and optimize data pipelines that process and normalize large volumes of records
- Troubleshoot and resolve data issues across ingestion, transformation, and delivery pipelines
- Collaborate with data scientists and data engineers to ensure Dataro models run effectively for every customer
- Guide customers through onboarding, technical implementation, and long-term success with Dataro
- Represent the engineering function in-market and advocate for customer needs internally
Benefits
- Fully covered "silver" tier healthcare plan (with medical/dental/optical)
- 401k plan, matched up to 5%
- 4 weeks paid leave (with additional leave if moving house, having a baby, etc, subject to our internal policies)
- 10 days paid sick leave
- Professional development budget for courses, mentoring or conferences and additional home office budget
- Additional Paid Volunteering Leave to give back to the causes that matter to you
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
