Data Platform Engineer (26-27)

Role overview

Data Platform Engineer (26–27 school year; target start July 1, 2026) builds and operates IDEA’s production data infrastructure on Snowflake. You’ll design and maintain automated ingestion (ELT) pipelines, manage platform performance and cost, and support the organization’s move from legacy ETL to a modern lakehouse architecture.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain automated ELT pipelines ingesting data from diverse sources into Snowflake
• Configure cloud-native ingestion tools and Python-based pipelines when needed
• Build and maintain Bronze-layer tables with schema evolution, audit metadata, and lineage
• Implement ingestion validation, monitoring, and alerting to detect issues early
• Administer Snowflake resources: databases, schemas, warehouses, access controls, and security
• Manage Snowflake objects using infrastructure-as-code
• Own Terraform-based infrastructure definitions for Snowflake and related components
• Build CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure changes with safe deployment practices
• Optimize performance and cost (warehouse sizing, clustering, query/resource monitoring)
• Implement security best practices: RBAC, encryption, auditing, network policies
• Maintain documentation and runbooks; participate in design discussions and code reviews
• Troubleshoot pipeline/platform failures using root-cause analysis
• Collaborate with Analytics Engineering, DataOps, and Data Governance partners

Requirements / Qualifications (from posting)

• Hands-on experience building ELT/ingestion pipelines into Snowflake
• Snowflake administration experience (warehouses, security/access, schemas/databases)
• Ability to implement and operate production-grade ingestion with monitoring, validation, and observability
• Experience using infrastructure-as-code, specifically Terraform
• Strong security and operational best practices for data platforms

Nice-to-haves

• Experience transitioning from legacy ETL to lakehouse architecture
• Experience developing reusable templates/modules for onboarding new sources/domains

Supervisory responsibilities

• Individual contributor role with no direct reports (senior engineers may mentor peers)

Location / travel

• Full-time remote position based in Texas
• Preference for candidates in: Austin, El Paso, Houston, Permian Basin (Midland/Odessa), Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, or Tarrant County (Fort Worth)
• Minimal travel (5–10% annually) for collaboration and critical milestones