Senior / Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform at Airops

ABOUT AIROPS AirOps is the first end-to-end content engineering platform built for the AI era. In a world where discovery is shifting from traditional search to AI-driven platforms, we help brands get found—and stay found. We are currently in a phase of hyper-growth, having 5x’d our revenue in the last year by helping marketing teams at Ramp, Chime, Carta, and Rippling turn content quality into a durable competitive advantage. Our platform equips marketers to navigate the new discovery landscape, prioritize high-impact opportunities, and create accurate, on-brand content that earns citations from AI and trust from humans. Backed by Greylock, Unusual Ventures, Wing VC, and Founder Collective, we are building the intelligent systems that will empower the next generation of marketing leaders. AirOps is headquartered in San Francisco, New York and Montevideo. Why this role, why now Our product is data. Customers like Webflow, Ramp, and Carta rely on AirOps to understand exactly how they show up across AI search, and that data has to be fast, accurate, and trusted. Until now, data engineering has lived inside the broader engineering team. We've outgrown that. As our product becomes more data-intensive, we need someone who owns this layer end to end, not because it's in their job description, but because they won't have it any other way. This is the foundational data hire at AirOps, and it's one of the most important roles we're filling this year. What you'll do - Own the data pipelines that power customer-facing analytics. You define what done means, you ship it, and you stand behind it - Design and maintain the serving layer that delivers citation rates, share of voice, and mention trends to customers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and beyond, with strong guarantees on accuracy, freshness, and latency - Work directly with product and engineering to ship data-powered features. You move fluidly between a product spec and a query plan without losing momentum or waiting to be told what the next problem is - Build enrichment pipelines that shape raw data into the derived entities our product depends on. You go beyond the ask when you see a better path - Set the data engineering foundation as the first dedicated hire in this function, working closely with our VP of Engineering. You build for what the team will need, not just what's asked of you today Who you are - You think like a backend engineer who works closer to the data layer. When someone asks who your users are, you talk about customers, not analysts, and you take it personally when what they see is wrong or slow - You've shipped systems where the output lands directly in a product that external users interact with, not an internal dashboard, not a BI report - Strong in Python and SQL, with hands-on experience in ClickHouse, Redshift, or similar OLAP systems at product scale. You know the difference between a query that works and one that holds up under real customer load - You own things without being asked and drive them to closure. Scope doesn't constrain you, outcomes do - You have the range to hold your own in a technical architecture discussion and ship the thing the same week - 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience with clear evidence of owning a data-powered product surface Nice to have - Experience at a company where data is the product: Propel, Tinybird, Hex, Amplitude, Mixpanel, or similar - Familiarity with AWS-native stack: Glue, S3, Redshift - Experience integrating LLMs into data pipelines for enrichment, classification, or tagging OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES 1. Extreme Ownership 2. Quality 3. Curiosity and Play 4. Make Our Customers Heroes 5. Respectful Candor BENEFITS - Equity in a fast-growing startup - Competitive benefits package tailored to your location - Flexible time off policy - Parental Leave - A fun-loving and (just a bit) nerdy team that loves to move fast!