Staff Data Platform Engineer - Data Engine
Applied Intuition
About Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition is the vehicle intelligence company that accelerates the global adoption of safe, AI-driven machines. Founded in 2017, Applied Intuition delivers the toolchain, Vehicle OS, and autonomy stacks to help customers build intelligent vehicles and shorten time to market. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers and major programs across the Department of Defense trust Applied Intuition's solutions to deliver vehicle intelligence. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining, and agriculture industries and is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with offices in Washington, D.C., San Diego, CA, Ft. Walton Beach, FL, Ann Arbor, MI, London, Stuttgart, Munich, Stockholm, Seoul, and Tokyo. Learn more at appliedintuition.com.
We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. (Note: For EpiSci job openings, fully remote work will be considered by exception.)
About the role
We are looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to shape the strategy, architecture, and execution of our next-generation data ecosystem. In this role, you will partner closely with our autonomy stack teams—the “customers” of our platform—to deeply understand their workflows, pain points, and evolving needs.
You will lead the design and development of robust, scalable, and data-intensive distributed systems that power the full lifecycle of autonomous driving data: collection, ingestion, curation, machine learning training, and evaluation. You’ll be a key decision-maker in defining best practices, data contracts, and integration patterns across upstream and downstream systems.
This is a highly impactful role for someone who thrives at the intersection of technical leadership, system design, and cross-team collaboration, and who wants to elevate the capabilities of our data platform to support cutting-edge ML and autonomy development.
At Applied Intuition, you will:
- Drive Data Platform Strategy – Define the long-term vision and technical roadmap for the data ecosystem, balancing scalability, reliability, cost efficiency, and developer experience
- Partner with Customers – Engage deeply with autonomy stack teams to gather requirements, uncover pain points, and translate them into platform capabilities
- Lead Complex Workflow Development – Architect and build end-to-end, large-scale ETL and data workflows for data collection, ingestion, transformation, and delivery
- Establish Data Contracts – Define and enforce clear SLAs and contracts with upstream data producers and downstream data consumers
- Set Best Practices – Champion data engineering best practices around governance, schema evolution, lineage, quality, and observability
- Mentor and Influence – Guide other engineers and teams on designing scalable data systems and making strategic technology choices
- Collaborate Across Functions – Work with infrastructure, ML platform, autonomy stack, and labeling teams to ensure smooth data flow and ecosystem integration
We're looking for someone who has:
- 10+ years of experience in data engineering, distributed systems, or related backend engineering roles
- Proven track record of architecting and building large-scale, data-intensive, distributed systems
- Deep experience with complex ETL pipelines, data ingestion frameworks, and data processing engines (e.g., Spark, Flink, Airflow, Flyte, Kafka, etc)
- Strong understanding of data modeling, partitioning, schema evolution, and metadata management at scale
- Hands-on experience with cloud object stores (e.g., AWS S3), lakehouse architectures, and data warehouse technologies
- Ability to drive technical discussions with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
- Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence across teams and functions
Nice to have:
- Experience supporting ML/AI workflows at scale, from raw data ingestion to model training and evaluation
- Familiarity with data governance, lineage tracking, and observability tools
- Experience in autonomous systems, robotics, or other high-volume sensor data domains
- Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects
Why Join Us?
You’ll be at the heart of enabling autonomous driving innovation—building the systems that allow teams to harness massive amounts of real-world and simulated data for developing and validating our stack. You’ll have the autonomy to set the technical direction, the opportunity to solve some of the hardest data engineering problems, and the ability to make a measurable impact on the success of our platform and products.
Compensation at Applied Intuition for eligible roles includes base salary, equity, and benefits. Base salary is a single component of the total compensation package, which may also include equity in the form of options and/or restricted stock units, comprehensive health, dental, vision, life and disability insurance coverage, 401k retirement benefits with employer match, learning and wellness stipends, and paid time off. Note that benefits are subject to change and may vary based on jurisdiction of employment.
Applied Intuition pay ranges reflect the minimum and maximum intended target base salary for new hire salaries for the position. The actual base salary offered to a successful candidate will additionally be influenced by a variety of factors including experience, credentials & certifications, educational attainment, skill level requirements, interview performance, and the level and scope of the position.
Please reference the job posting’s subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the location listed is: $153,000 - $222,000 USD annually.
Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Applied Intuition is an equal opportunity employer and federal contractor or subcontractor. Consequently, the parties agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of 41 CFR 60-1.4(a), 41 CFR 60-300.5(a) and 41 CFR 60-741.5(a) and that these laws are incorporated herein by reference. These regulations prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals based on their status as protected veterans or individuals with disabilities, and prohibit discrimination against all individuals based on their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin. These regulations require that covered prime contractors and subcontractors take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status or disability. The parties also agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of Executive Order 13496 (29 CFR Part 471, Appendix A to Subpart A), relating to the notice of employee rights under federal labor laws.