Senior Staff Data Engineer
About The Position
Join the team building SailPoint Observability & Insights, an industry-leading visualization capability for identity governance that shows every access path from identities to sensitive data and enables fast, policy-driven action from a unified view. This is a Senior Staff role: you will design and build critical systems, set technical direction, and lead cross-team execution. You will own core data platform capabilities behind Observability & Insights (powered by SailPoint’s internal Identity Graph), spanning batch and streaming pipelines, warehousing, and graph-oriented storage. You will help power a graph with billions of nodes and edges, where backend architecture directly determines UX speed, clarity, and trust.
Requirements
- 12+ years building production software, with substantial time in data engineering at SaaS scale.
- 6+ years owning architecture for commercial data platforms or major data subsystems.
- US Citizenship is required for this position due to FedRAMP support responsibilities.
- Expert experience with Snowflake data modeling and query optimization.
- Strong hands-on experience with dbt, Airflow, and distributed processing patterns (batch + streaming).
- Strong experience with Cassandra and familiarity with graph-oriented data systems.
- Experience building or operating systems that handle billions of relationships with predictable latency and high reliability.
- Deep understanding of cloud-native systems on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Proven record of leading high-complexity projects across team/org boundaries.
- Proven ability to improve team-level delivery quality (planning, dependencies, execution, reliability).
- Strong communication skills: can explain tradeoffs to engineers, product leaders, and executives.
- BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice To Haves
- Experience running data platforms with SLOs and modern observability (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog).
- Experience instrumenting data jobs and services for performance, quality, and cost visibility.
- Familiarity with IAM/IGA, compliance, security, or privacy-sensitive product domains.
- Experience with Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and continuous delivery for data systems.
- Familiarity with AI.
- Familiarity with data lake patterns and Spark/Flink operational tuning.
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture and implementation of scalable ETL/ELT pipelines and data services for Observability & Insights.
- Own technical strategy for core data domains; align roadmap and design decisions across partner teams.
- Act as primary technical lead for cross-team initiatives with clear delivery outcomes.
- Set and enforce standards for data quality, governance, lineage, observability, and operational readiness.
- Drive performance and cost improvements across Spark/Flink/SQL/CQL workloads and storage patterns.
- Optimize graph-serving data models and access patterns so complex relationship visualizations remain responsive at extreme scale.
- Partner closely with product and UI engineering to deliver low-latency experiences for graph exploration, filtering, and risk investigation.
- Lead design reviews and provide high-signal code and architecture feedback.
- Partner with product, infrastructure, security, and analytics teams to define practical solutions.
- Participate in on-call for critical systems and lead incident follow-throughs that improve system resilience.
Benefits
- SailPoint Corporate Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission
- Potential eligibility for equity participation
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Short-term and long-term disability
- Life insurance and Accidental Death & Dismemberment (AD&D)
- Supplemental life insurance for employees, spouses, and children
- Flexible spending accounts for health care, and dependent care; limited purpose flexible spending account
- 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company matching
- Flexible vacation policy
- 8 paid holidays annually
- Sick leave
- Paid parental leave
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and Care Counselors
- Legal Assistance, Critical Illness, Accident, Hospital Indemnity and Pet Insurance options
- Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Associate degree
