Data engineer

Writer • Full-time • Remote (San Francisco, California, United States) • $157.80k - $215k / year • 2w ago

Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs

### Why this Role is Featured on The SaaS Jobs

Data engineering roles become strategically important in SaaS when product usage, customer outcomes, and revenue signals must be translated into reliable datasets. WRITER sits in the enterprise generative AI segment, where platform adoption and agent performance create complex telemetry and governance needs. The remit here spans analytics and operational data, reflecting how modern SaaS companies increasingly treat data infrastructure as part of the product and not only a back-office function.

For a SaaS career, the long-term value is in building systems that scale across teams and use cases: warehouse design, cost and performance optimisation, and production-grade pipeline practices. Working with tools like dbt, Snowflake or BigQuery, and orchestration frameworks develops a portable skill set across SaaS organisations that depend on self-serve metrics, experimentation, and trustworthy reporting. The emphasis on data quality, observability, and access control also maps closely to enterprise SaaS expectations around reliability and security.

The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.

Job Description

🚀 About WRITER

WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI.

Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI.

📐 About the role

We're looking for a data engineer to help design, build, and scale the data infrastructure that powers our analytics, reporting, and product insights. As part of a small but high-impact data team, you'll define the architectural foundation and tooling for our end-to-end data ecosystem—the systems that enable data-driven decisions across the entire company and fuel WRITER's rapid growth.

You'll work closely with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to build robust pipelines, scalable data models, and reliable workflows that transform raw data into actionable intelligence. This isn't just about moving data around—it's about creating the foundation that helps us understand how our AI agents perform, how our customers succeed, and where our biggest opportunities lie. If you're passionate about data infrastructure and solving complex data problems at a company that's reshaping how enterprises work with AI, this is your opportunity to make an outsized impact.

Core tools in our tech stack include: Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt, Fivetran, Hightouch, Segment

Periphery tools: AWS DMS, Google Datastream, Terraform, GithHub Actions

This is a hybrid role based out of our San Francisco or New York City hubs, reporting to the director of analytics.

🦸🏻‍♀️ What you'll do

Design and maintain scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines and ingestion frameworks across multiple data sources, ensuring reliable delivery of critical business data
Architect and optimize our data warehouse (Snowflake/BigQuery) to ensure performance, cost efficiency, and security as we scale to support hundreds of enterprise customers
Build efficient and reusable data models optimized for both analytical and operational workloads, enabling teams across WRITER to access the insights they need
Define and implement data governance frameworks including schema management, lineage tracking, and access control to maintain data quality and security
Build and manage robust ETL workflows using dbt and orchestration tools like Airflow or Prefect, with comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and logging to ensure pipeline observability
Develop data validation, testing, and anomaly detection systems that catch issues before they impact business decisions, establishing SLAs for key data assets
Partner with product and engineering teams to deliver data solutions that align with downstream use cases, from training AI models to measuring product performance

⭐️ What you need

5+ years of hands-on experience in a data engineering role, ideally in a SaaS or fast-growing tech environment where you've built systems from the ground up
Expert-level proficiency in SQL, dbt, and Python—you write clean, efficient code and know how to optimize queries that run against massive datasets
Strong experience with data pipeline orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, or similar) and CI/CD for data workflows—you treat pipelines like production software
Deep understanding of cloud-based data architectures on AWS or GCP, including networking, IAM, and security best practices that keep enterprise data safe
Strong grasp of data modeling principles, warehouse optimization, and cost management—you know how to build scalable systems that don't break the bank
Passionate about data reliability, testing, and monitoring—you believe quality data is the foundation of good decisions
You thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and enjoy building systems from scratch, bringing clarity to complex problems and seeing them through to impact
You embody our values: Connect (collaborate across teams to understand needs), Challenge (push for better solutions and question assumptions), Own (take full responsibility for your systems and their impact)

🍩 Benefits & perks (US Full-time employees)

Generous PTO, plus company holidays
Medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family
Paid parental leave for all parents (12 weeks)
Fertility and family planning support
Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri
Flexible spending account and dependent FSA options
Health savings account for eligible plans with company contribution
Annual work-life stipends for:
- Wellness stipend for gym, massage/chiropractor, personal training, etc.
- Learning and development stipend
Company-wide off-sites and team off-sites
Competitive compensation, company stock options and 401k

WRITER is an equal-opportunity employer and is committed to diversity. We don't make hiring or employment decisions based on race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state or federal law. Under the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By submitting your application on the application page, you acknowledge and agree to WRITER's Global Candidate Privacy Notice.