About MetaCTO
At MetaCTO, we specialize in helping startups and growing companies build exceptional digital products through mobile and web app development and fractional CTO services. As a Data Engineer, you’ll own the data infrastructure that powers client applications — from raw ingestion through production-ready analytics — and play a critical role in enabling our AI-first development teams to build smarter, faster products.
Job Overview
We’re looking for a Data Engineer who takes pride in building data systems that just work — clean pipelines, reliable transformations, and analytics infrastructure that teams can actually trust. You’re comfortable across the modern data stack, opinionated about data quality, and energized by the challenge of turning messy raw data into something that drives real product decisions.
You’ll partner closely with engineers, product managers, and AI/ML practitioners to architect and maintain the data foundations our clients depend on. And like every role at MetaCTO, you’ll embrace AI development tools — using Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot to move faster and do more with less.
Responsibilities
- Design and build scalable bronze, silver, and gold data tiers in Snowflake, establishing clean data architecture that serves both analytics and AI product needs
- Own performance and cost optimization across the data warehouse, including query tuning, warehouse sizing, clustering strategies, and resource monitoring
- Build and maintain transformation layers using dbt, enforcing modeling best practices, documentation standards, and testing coverage
- Orchestrate data workflows with reliable scheduling and dependency management, ensuring pipelines are observable, idempotent, and resilient to failures
- Implement data quality frameworks (automated validation, anomaly detection, lineage tracking) that give downstream consumers confidence in the data they depend on
- Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate business requirements into data models and reporting infrastructure
- Champion data governance best practices including access controls, PII handling, retention policies, and compliance requirements
- Leverage AI development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate development and maintain higher code quality across the data stack
Requirements
- 5+ years of data engineering experience designing and shipping production data pipelines and analytics infrastructure
- Deep proficiency with SQL and at least one primary data warehouse platform (Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift), including performance tuning and cost management
- Hands-on experience with dbt for data transformation, modeling, and testing in production environments
- Proficiency in Python for data engineering tasks — pipeline scripting, data validation, API integrations, and automation
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools, including DAG design and operational monitoring
- Solid understanding of cloud data services on AWS or GCP — S3, Glue, Kinesis, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, or equivalent
- Strong grasp of data modeling concepts — star/snowflake schemas, slowly changing dimensions, event-driven models, and normalization tradeoffs
- Experience working with streaming and batch data architectures, including event-driven systems using Kafka or similar
- Familiarity with AI development tools and willingness to integrate them into daily workflows for faster, higher-quality delivery
- Strong communication skills — you can translate data architecture decisions into plain language for product and business stakeholders
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Apache Spark or distributed data processing frameworks for large-scale transformations
- Exposure to ML platform infrastructure — feature stores, training data pipelines, or model monitoring
- Familiarity with data observability platforms such as Monte Carlo, Great Expectations, or dbt tests at scale
- AWS or GCP data engineering certifications
- Experience working in a consultancy or agency environment serving multiple clients simultaneously
Position Details
- Type: Full-Time
- Location: 100% Remote (US time zones preferred for client collaboration)
- Base Salary Range: $120,000 - $160,000
Benefits
At MetaCTO, we believe that great work starts with a great workplace. We offer a competitive total rewards package that supports your well-being, growth, and financial security.
Our benefits include:
- 100% remote work with flexibility to manage your schedule
- Unlimited paid vacation to recharge and maintain work-life balance
- 401(k) plan with a 400% company match on the first 6% deferred
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Health Savings Account (HSA) and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options
- Group term life insurance, plus additional coverage options