Staff Engineer - Data Platform

Build the data platform that powers Shopify. Our Data Platform Tools team owns how Shopify moves, monitors, and uses data at massive scale. You’ll build the internal tooling and platform services that let thousands of engineers and analysts move, monitor, and govern analytical data safely at massive scale.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design, build, and operate internal platform services and CLIs that teams use to author, schedule, validate, and ship analytics and operational data modeling changes safely.
- Improve reliability and operability for data platform systems: SLO-minded monitoring, incident response patterns, safe rollouts, and clear runbooks.
- Lead large-scale migrations and deprecations (e.g., storage/table formats, orchestration, query engines) with a phased plan, guardrails, and measurable cutover criteria.
- Drive cost and performance outcomes at scale: identify systemic bottlenecks, right-size workloads, and build guardrails that prevent expensive failure modes.
- Build developer experience for data producers/consumers: fast feedback loops, golden paths, self-serve workflows, and actionable error messages.
- Partner across teams to standardize patterns (metadata, access, testing, promotion pipelines) while preserving escape hatches for legitimate exceptions.
QUALIFICATIONS
- You design maintainable systems, operate them responsibly in production, and reason about correctness, reliability, and performance when data and platform changes affect many teams.
- Production ownership: ships changes with a plan for rollout/rollback, monitors impact, and follows through after launch.
- Systems thinking: clear interfaces/contracts, explicit failure modes, and pragmatic tradeoffs between correctness, freshness, cost, and complexity.
- Data-change discipline: comfortable reasoning about backfills, idempotency, schema evolution, and blast radius when many downstream datasets depend on a platform behavior.
- Proficiency with at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
- Bonus: hands-on experience with BigQuery, Airflow/Composer, Iceberg/Delta (or similar open table formats), data lake/lakehouse operations, or large-scale platform migrations.
At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly — not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days.
Ready to build the platform behind the platform? Join us.