Bain’s NGSS team is building Aura, a global workforce data and analytics platform that supports analytics, machine learning, and product experiences. This Staff Data Engineer role is embedded in Aura and focuses on the data infrastructure that makes the platform reliable, scalable, and production-ready, with ownership across architecture, performance, and operational support.
What you’ll do
- Own Aura’s data platform, including architecture, reliability, and scalability.
- Design, build, and maintain data pipelines from raw ingestion through downstream analytics layers, including dashboards and ML features.
- Lead greenfield infrastructure initiatives from scratch and take delivery through production.
- Optimize performance and cost across data workflows, such as query tuning and storage optimization.
- Drive engineering best practices for data systems, including testing, documentation, and observability.
- Support production operations and contribute to continuous improvement of production data systems.
- Implement data quality and monitoring by establishing pipeline alerting and data quality monitors in DBT across the data stack.
- Triage and resolve data requests from business and technical stakeholders, including discrepancies, pipeline issues, and ad-hoc requests.
- Partner across teams with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and AI to deliver scalable data solutions.
- Mentor engineers through code reviews and technical guidance.
Required qualifications
- 5-8+ years of experience designing scalable data architecture.
- Associate’s/Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
- Strong knowledge of software engineering best practices, including testing, CI/CD, and code reviews.
- Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and collaborate across cross-functional teams.
- Advanced SQL and deep experience with modern data warehouses, especially Snowflake.
- Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow.
- Experience with DBT for data modeling, transformation, and data quality monitoring.
- Strong Python programming skills.
- Cloud experience, particularly AWS (including S3, Lambda, ECS, RDS, MWAA).
- Familiarity with version control, CI/CD workflows, and Infrastructure-as-Code.
- Ability to own and deliver greenfield projects independently.
- Deep expertise in Snowflake performance tuning and cost optimization.
- Background in analytics or ML data preparation.
- Prior experience embedded in a startup or small data team.
- Familiarity with OpenSearch for log analysis or search-backed data products.
Compensation and location
Location: Chicago, IL (onsite)
Salary: USD 141,000 - 169,250 per year
Estimated annualized compensation includes base salary, an annual discretionary performance bonus, and a 401(k) plan with an annual employer contribution based on years of service, as part of Bain’s best-in-class benefits package.
Benefits
- 4.5% 401(k) company contribution, increasing after 3 years of service and 100% vested upon start date.
- Bain & Company’s comprehensive benefits and wellness program designed to support personal independence, protection, and stability for employees and their families.
- Medical, dental, and vision premiums: Bain pays 100% of individual employee premiums, offering comprehensive coverage without impacting your paycheck.
- Generous paid time off, including parental leave, sick leave, and paid holidays.
- Fully vested 401(k) company contribution.
- Paid Life and Long-Term Disability insurance.
- Annual fitness reimbursements.
Technology stack
SQL, Snowflake, Airflow, DBT, Python, AWS (S3, Lambda, ECS, RDS, MWAA), OpenSearch.
