Senior Data Platform Engineer

Role Overview

The San Diego Studio analytics team is seeking a hands-on Senior Data Platform Engineer to own and evolve data infrastructure on AWS and Databricks. You’ll lead cloud-driven Databricks configurations, reliability and cost optimization (FinOps), and contribute to ETL/data pipeline development.

Responsibilities

• AWS & Databricks administration
  • Configure and manage core AWS services.
  • Partner with Data Scientists to manage the Databricks environment.
  • Apply security best practices including network segmentation and secrets management.
  • Own relationships with external vendors.
• ETL / Data Engineering
  • Support development and maintenance of data pipelines including Python/Spark/SQL and related AWS services (e.g., API Gateway, EC2, DynamoDB, Glue).
  • Implement data quality checks and maintain documentation.
  • Participate in code reviews and uphold engineering standards.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  • Design, build, and maintain IaC with Terraform for AWS and Databricks.
  • Standardize and templatize environment provisioning across dev/prod.
  • Use CI/CD for infrastructure and data changes.
• FinOps and cost governance
  • Establish tagging, budgets, and chargeback/showback.
  • Rightsize compute/storage/job configurations.
  • Manage Savings Plans/Reserved Instances, Spot strategies, and storage lifecycle policies.
• Studio collaboration
  • Work with data engineers, data scientists, and stakeholders to unblock deliverables.
  • Document designs, standards, and operational practices to help a small team move quickly and safely.

Requirements

• 3+ years in data/platform/DevOps engineering with significant AWS experience.
• Proficient in Python and SQL.
• Proficient in AWS budget and cost management, including AWS Trusted Advisor, CloudWatch, and CloudTrail.
• CI/CD experience for infra/data (e.g., GitHub Actions and/or Jenkins), plus code reviews, testing, and change management.
• Security-first mindset: IAM/RBAC, least privilege, network controls, encryption, secrets management.
• FinOps knowledge: RI/Savings Plans, rightsizing, storage lifecycle, cost allocation/tagging, monitoring/alerts.
• Excellent communication and ability to operate in a small, high-impact team.

Nice to Haves (Pluses)

• Experience with AWS ETL services such as Glue, Kinesis, Lambda, etc.
• Terraform experience.
• Interest/passion for baseball (MLB The Show) and video games.