Staff Data Platform Engineer - Virtual
About The Position
Alight is seeking a hands-on Staff Data Platform Engineer to evolve the Alight Data Engine, a benefits data platform that connects, standardizes, and enables information exchange across the benefits ecosystem. The platform currently supports hundreds of data integrations and must scale to tens of thousands without a proportional increase in engineering or operational effort. The engineer will lead the design and implementation of orchestration architecture, extensible data transformation frameworks, and developer tooling that makes integrations faster to deploy, easier to operate, and more reliable at scale. The role has substantial ownership of technical direction and implementation, establishing a foundation for data-driven products and services across Alight.
Requirements
- 8 or more years of data platform, data engineering, or software engineering experience with production-grade data systems.
- Deep knowledge of data modeling, SQL, transformation frameworks, orchestration, and data quality.
- Extensive Python engineering skills and experience creating extensible frameworks, reusable abstractions, and developer tooling.
- Demonstrated experience designing and scaling data platforms, including orchestration, pipeline execution, and infrastructure supporting large numbers of independently managed workloads.
- Demonstrated experience designing configuration-driven systems that generalize complex processing requirements.
- Experience supporting production applications and operational workflows beyond analytics or reporting, with strong reliability, availability, and observability requirements.
- Ability to independently establish technical direction and drive platform architecture and integrated delivery across Product and Engineering teams.
- Fluency with approved agentic coding practices.
Nice To Haves
- Hands-on experience with Dagster or comparable modern data orchestration platforms.
- Healthcare or benefits data experience.
- Experience optimizing cloud infrastructure, platform cost, and operational support models, particularly within AWS.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical design, architecture, and implementation of the Data Engine’s ingestion, transformation, and orchestration infrastructure to increase integration capacity and reduce manual effort.
- Design extensible data models, transformation frameworks, and configuration-driven abstractions for standardizing heterogeneous client and source data.
- Build developer tooling and reusable platform capabilities that help engineering and operations teams independently develop, deploy, monitor, and maintain data integrations.
- Design scalable orchestration and execution patterns for thousands of independently managed data pipelines and workloads.
- Improve platform reliability, observability, and operational efficiency through automated validation, recovery, monitoring, and infrastructure optimization.
- Partner with Product, Architecture, Software Engineering, and Operations to align platform capabilities with product delivery and client rollout needs.
- Deliver platform standards, documentation, reference implementations, and adoption guidance.
Benefits
- Health, dental, and vision coverage starting Day One.
- Wellbeing programs.
- Retirement plans with contribution matching.
- Generous time off.
- Parental leave.
- Continuing education and training.
- Career growth opportunities.
- Competitive total rewards package.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
