Big Data Engineer

About Placer.ai

Placer.ai is transforming how organizations understand the physical world. Our location analytics platform provides unprecedented visibility into locations, markets, and consumer behavior. Placer empowers thousands of customers—from Fortune 500 companies, to local governments and nonprofits— to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

What sets us apart? We've built the most advanced location intelligence platform in the market while maintaining an uncompromising commitment to privacy, proving that powerful analytics and responsible data practices can coexist.

Our growth reflects the market's demand: we reached $100M in annual recurring revenue within just 6 years of launching, achieved unicorn status with a $1B+ valuation in 2022, and continue to expand rapidly as one of North America's fastest-growing tech companies. We're creating a $100B+ market opportunity, and we're just getting started.

Named one of Forbes America's Best Startup Employers and a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company, we're building a culture where innovation thrives, collaboration is the norm, and every team member contributes to reshaping how the world understands location.

Summary

We’re looking for a hands-on Individual Contributor Data Engineer to design, build, and operate large-scale data products at Placer.ai. You’ll own mission-critical pipelines and services, balancing pre-computation with on-demand execution to deliver complex, business-critical insights with the right cost, latency, and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Design and run Spark data pipelines, orchestrated with Airflow, governed with Unity Catalog.
• Build scalable batch and on-demand data products, aiming for the sweet spot between pre-compute and on-demand for complex logic - owning SLAs/SLOs, cost, and performance.
• Implement robust data quality, lineage, and observability across pipelines.
• Contribute to the architecture and scaling of our Export Center for off-platform report generation and delivery.
• Partner with Product, Analytics, and Backend to turn requirements into resilient data systems.
  
  

• BSc degree in Computer Science or an equivalent
• 5+ years of professional Backend/Data-Engineering experience
• 2+ years of Data-Engineering experience
• Production experience with Apache Spark, Airflow, Databricks, and Unity Catalog.
• Strong SQL and one of Python/Scala; solid data modeling and performance tuning chops.
• Proven track record building large-scale (multi-team, multi-tenant) data pipelines and services.
• Pragmatic approach to cost/latency trade-offs, caching, and storage formats.
• Experience shipping reporting/exports pipelines and integrating with downstream delivery channels.
• IC mindset: you lead through design, code, and collaboration (no direct reports).
  
  

• Delta Lake, query optimization, and workload management experience.
• Observability stacks (e.g., metrics, logging, data quality frameworks).
• GCS or other major cloud provider experience.
• Terraform IAC experience.
  
  

• Join a rocketship! We are pioneers of a new market that we are creating
• Take a central and critical role at Placer.ai
• Work with, and learn from, top-notch talent
• Competitive salary
• Excellent benefits
  
  

• Placer.ai in a nutshell
• Placer.ai's $100M round C funding (unicorn valuation!)
• Placer.ai's data
• Placer.ai in the news
• COVID-19 Economic Recovery Dashboard