Senior Data Engineer II

About the Role

The data and AI team is a critical function within Business Technology. Our mission is to enable integrated data layers for all of Samsara with the insights, tools, and infrastructure to make data-driven decisions. We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer II who brings a software engineer's mindset to data infrastructure. You'll manage data APIs, architect Spark-driven workflows at scale, design data platforms as products, and build the next generation of intelligent tooling including MCP servers and AI agents that automate and accelerate data engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

Data Engineering

• Develop and maintain end-to-end data pipelines and backend ingestion workflows, contributing to Samsara's Data Platform.
• Work with data from ERP (NetSuite), CRM (Salesforce), product, order flow, and support ticket sources.
• Manage critical data pipelines to enable growth initiatives and advanced analytics.
• Facilitate data integration and transformation across applications, data layers, and the data lake.
• Develop and improve data architecture, data quality, monitoring, observability, and data availability.
• Write data transformations in SQL/Python for Analytics, Marketing Operations, and Sales Operations teams.
• Design, build, and operate large-scale Spark and PySpark workflows for batch and streaming data processing across Databricks and cloud environments.
• Optimize Spark job performance, tuning partitioning, shuffle, caching, and resource allocation.

Data APIs

• Design, build, and manage data APIs in Python using frameworks such as FastAPI.
• Manage API runtime in AWS ecosystems (Lambda and RDS).
• Monitor and optimize APIs, tracking observability via Datadog or Splunk.
• Participate in on-call rotations and act as a technical escalation contact for data quality and API uptime.

Platform & Systems Thinking

• Define and enforce data engineering standards, patterns, and best practices.
• Design systems with long-term maintainability, clear contracts, testable components, and thoughtful failure modes.
• Collaborate with platform and infrastructure teams to evolve the enterprise data architecture.

MCP Servers & AI Agents

• Build and maintain MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that expose Samsara's data assets to AI models and tooling.
• Integrate agentic workflows into the data engineering lifecycle.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI-native tooling and LLMs for data engineering.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Champion Samsara's cultural principles as the company scales globally.
• Provide mentorship, technical guidance, training, and knowledge-sharing to junior team members.
• Engage with cross-functional stakeholders to design scalable data solutions and lead projects end-to-end.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Data Science, Information Technology, or equivalent engineering program.
• 10+ years of work experience as a Software Engineer with data focus or as a Data Engineer.
• 8+ years of experience building and maintaining large-scale, production-grade end-to-end data pipelines, including data modeling.
• 5+ years of hands-on Spark / PySpark experience in production, including job optimization and performance tuning.
• 3+ years of experience developing and managing APIs, preferably in Python.
• Strong programming capabilities in Python and SQL.
• Experience with cloud data warehouses/lakehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or Apache Iceberg).
• Exposure to ETL tools such as Fivetran, dbt, or equivalent.
• Experience with Python-based API frameworks and API management tools.
• Experience with relational databases: MySQL, AWS RDS/Aurora, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, or equivalent.
• Cloud experience with AWS, Azure, and/or GCP.

Additional Strengths

• Experience designing and governing a centralized semantic layer.
• Logging and monitoring experience (Splunk, Datadog, AWS CloudWatch).
• AWS Serverless technologies: API Gateway, Lambda, S3, SNS, SQS, SecretsManager.