Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Data

Your Impact on our Mission:

We're hiring a Staff Infrastructure Engineer (Data) to design, harden, and operate the distributed systems that power analytics, experimentation, and ML at Zocdoc. You'll set the long‑term architectural vision for our AWS‑based data platform, establish SLOs and guardrails, and drive cost, reliability, and security for data at scale. This is an infrastructure‑heavy role (SRE/platform engineering mindset) for someone who loves building robust, stable, and governed data foundations, not just pipelines.

You'll enjoy this role if you are…

• Motivated by availability, latency, and cost SLOs for data platforms, owning them end‑to‑end.
• Equally comfortable designing multi‑account AWS architectures and hands‑on debugging of Spark jobs.
• Pragmatic: you favor simple, operable solutions and automation over bespoke one‑offs.
• Excited to influence data producers/consumers via contracts, governance, and self‑service platforms.

Your day to day is…

• Own platform reliability & operations for data infrastructure: capacity planning, incident response/on‑call, disaster recovery, and performance tuning across compute and storage (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, Glue/Athena, Kinesis/Kafka).
• Architect the lake / lakehouse layers (Delta Lake / Apache Iceberg / Hudi) with clear data contracts, schema evolution, compaction, and retention; build the controls that make it safe and fast.
• Harden platform surfaces (networking, IAM, encryption, key management, VPC endpoints/PrivateLink, Lake Formation/Unity Catalog) for PHI/PII, auditing, and least‑privilege by default.
• Establish observability for data systems (Datadog/CloudWatch): golden signals, lineage, SLIs/SLOs, and cost telemetry/FinOps.
• Infrastructure‑as‑Code everything (Terraform/CDK) including EMR/EKS clusters, Snowflake roles/warehouses, secrets, and CI/CD for data platform changes.
• Optimize warehouse usage (Snowflake preferred; BigQuery/Redshift welcome): warehouse sizing/queuing, clustering, pruning, caching, RBAC, cost controls.
• Partner with data engineering & security to set platform standards (orchestration like Dagster/Airflow; governance via Unity Catalog/Collibra/Lake Formation; quality and metadata services).

You'll be successful in this role if you have…

• 8+ years in infrastructure/SRE/platform engineering (or hybrid data platform) with deep AWS expertise (networking, IAM, CDK, S3, EKS, EMR, Glue, Lambda; multi‑account patterns).
• Expertise running distributed data processing at scale with Spark (Databricks or EMR/EKS), plus working knowledge of Hadoop/Hive/Presto/Trino.
• Strong SQL fundamentals and data modeling; Snowflake (or BigQuery/Redshift) performance and cost optimization.
• Proven leadership establishing SLOs, runbooks, incident response, and reliability tooling for data platforms.
• Solid IaC (Terraform), CI/CD, and security‑by‑default mindset for PHI/PII.

Bonus if you have…

• Experience with Delta/Iceberg lakehouse internals, table formats, and compaction strategies.
• Large‑scale Cloud‑based data compute (Spark on Databricks, autoscaling, queueing, scheduling).
• Hands‑on with metadata & governance stacks (Unity Catalog, Collibra), data quality frameworks, and cost governance.

Benefits

• Flexible, hybrid work environment at our convenient Soho location
• Unlimited Vacation
• 100% paid employee health benefit options (including medical, dental, and vision)
• Commuter Benefits
• 401(k) with employer funded match
• Corporate wellness programs with Headspace and Peloton
• Sabbatical leave (for employees with 5+ years of service)
• Competitive paid parental leave and fertility/family planning reimbursement
• Cell phone reimbursement
• Catered lunch everyday along with beverages and snacks
• Employee Resource Groups and ZocClubs to promote shared community and belonging
• Great Place to Work Certified