Sr. Data Engineer

We seek a Sr. Data Engineer who will design and build data products to empower the organization to make better decisions across all business, development, and research activities.

Protocol Labs is an open-source research, development, and deployment laboratory. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and many more. We aim to make human existence orders of magnitude better through technology. We are a fully distributed company. Our team of more than 100 members works remotely and in the open to improve the internet — humanity's most important technology — as we explore new advances in computing and related fields.

As a Data Engineer for Protocol Labs you own a wide surface and be the “go to” for multiple layers in the data stack including infrastructure, DB administration, ETL, and data architectures.

Internally, you’ll be responsible for leading the design, development, implementation, and maintenance of data products to empower the organization to make data informed decisions and significantly improve productivity.  

Externally, with the Filecoin blockchain, you’ll consume and produce public data, steering clear of  “user tracking” and the corresponding privacy concerns.

As a Data Engineer, you will...

• Partner with project and enablement leaders to understand data needs and translate these requirements into logical and physical data models that are easy to understand and use.
• Set up, maintain, and scale our data infrastructure, including a data warehouse, pipelines, and visualization tools.
• Build, maintain, and scale our data ingestion engine, gathering data from our networks, products, communities, systems,  and other sources.
• Create and support  automated data pipelines that output usable and accurate datasets.
• Build and enforce a pattern language across our data stack, ensuring that our definitions, taxonomy and tables are consistent, accurate, and well-understood. 
• Develop and maintain documentation to enable Labbers to understand our data and conduct analysis that drives actionable insights.
• Be a resident subject matter expert for relational and non-relational data management systems, complex data access patterns, and performance optimization.
• Champion Protocol Labs’ strategy for data governance, privacy, security, quality, and retention, ensuring compliance with legal and business requirements.
• Optimize database systems for performance, security, reliability, and scalability. This includes owning database scripts, indexes, partitions, shards, monitors, backups, logs, and metrics.

You may be a fit for this role if you have...

• Engineering background (e.g., CS, CE, or EE degree or equivalent experience).
• Ability to dive deeply into technical details (e.g., key dependencies, design choices, operability, etc.) and drive a constructive technical discussion.
• Expert knowledge in data design that meets the availability, scalability, and capacity demands of the business.
• Have demonstrated experience with data warehousing, data modeling, and building ETL pipelines.
• Fluency with SQL.
• Familiarity with Golang.  At the minimum, the willingness and ability to learn it for interoperability with other engineers at PL.
• Experience in data processing using traditional and distributed systems (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Airflow) or experience in data processing using AWS solutions (e.g., AWS Glue, AWS Lambda).
• Strong interdisciplinary collaboration skills, with the ability to communicate effectively verbally and in writing.

Bonus Points if you have experience with…

• Setting up, administering, supporting Redshift, Postgres, and TimescaleDB instances. 
• Visualization tools like Sisense and Observable.
• Open Source software communities.
• Building self-service reports/dashboards.
• Building automated reporting like weekly business reports, operational metric reports.
• Supporting day-to-day decision making with data pulls necessitated by the business and its various cycles. 

What’s it like to work at Protocol Labs?

Protocol Labs mission is to improve humanity’s most important technology, the Internet. We build protocols, systems, and tools to improve how it works. Today, we are focused on how we store, locate, and move information. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and more.

As a distributed team, we hire anywhere in the world, and at various levels of experience (entry, senior, staff). We look for people with unique perspectives and diverse backgrounds.

We have a great benefits package, including parental leave, contributions to your retirement, competitive pay, and unlimited time off. For U.S.-based employees, we also provide platinum-level health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family.