Senior Data Platform Engineer
About The Position
Umbra is seeking a Senior/Staff Data Platform Engineer to lead data infrastructure architecture for its Remote Sensing business. The role collaborates with product owners and multidisciplinary engineering teams to design, develop, and maintain data systems supporting autonomous satellite operations, analytics, and internal decision-making. The engineer will help shape how space radar data is consumed. The position is based on-site at one of Umbra’s offices in Santa Barbara/Goleta, California; Arlington, Virginia; or Reston, Virginia. The role focuses on scalable data systems for satellite, operations, and business data, including data pipelines, models, warehouses, lakehouse patterns, transformations, analytics, and platform capabilities.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, or a related field.
- At least 8 years of professional experience as a data engineer or in similar roles.
- Strong proficiency in SQL and experience with data warehousing, lakehouse architecture, and analytics engineering concepts.
- Proficiency in developing data pipelines with Python and SQL, using version control and CI/CD best practices.
- Proficiency with analytics and visualization tools such as Omni Analytics, Tableau, Power BI, or similar.
- Experience with Databricks, the Apache Hadoop ecosystem (HDFS, Spark, HBase, etc.), or similar large-scale data processing and lakehouse platforms.
- Experience with dbt or similar data transformation and modeling frameworks.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure for building reliable data storage and processing.
- Familiarity with monitoring and observability solutions such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic, Splunk, or similar.
- Effective communication skills, ability to work collaboratively in a team environment, and willingness to learn new skills and technology.
Nice To Haves
- Experience working in the aerospace industry.
- Experience with mission scheduling software and/or schedule optimization.
- Experience developing SAR image processing or formation applications.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, DevOps, Identity and Access Management, and Developer Platforms.
- Experience building custom GIS applications, STAC, or other imagery catalog APIs.
- Experience with semantic layers, data catalogs, lineage, or data quality tooling.
- Current security clearance or willingness and ability to acquire one.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and infrastructure to process, model, and analyze large volumes of satellite, operations, and business data.
- Develop and optimize data models, data warehouses, lakehouse patterns, and dbt transformations for internal analytics, machine learning applications, and operational decision-making.
- Build and operate analytics and data platform capabilities using tools such as Databricks, dbt, Omni Analytics, and related cloud services.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand data requirements and ensure data quality, reliability, performance, and usability.
- Implement best practices for data governance, reliability, security, compliance, lineage, cost management, and observability.
Benefits
- Flexible Time Off
- Sick, Family & Medical Leave
- Employer-funded medical, dental, vision, life, LTD, and STD coverage
- Employee-funded voluntary life, critical illness, accident, hospital indemnity, and pet insurance
- 401(k) with a 3% non-elective company contribution
- Stock options
- Free parking
- Free lunch in the office daily
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
