Senior Data Engineer

Hillspire, LLC is the family office management company serving all the investments, foundations, and activities of Eric and Wendy Schmidt and family. With a uniquely broad mandate, Hillspire oversees diverse assets and programs, including The Schmidt Family Foundation, Schmidt Ocean Institute, and Schmidt Sciences. Across our entities, we manage over 900 employees and oversee significant annual expenditures, ranging from grants and gifts to private investments and operational costs.

We are seeking a highly motivated, innovative, and collaborative Technology staff member to serve as the Senior Data engineer. The selected candidate will be a member of the Enterprise Technology Data Engineering & AI team, playing a pivotal role in driving innovation across the organization.

Summary

Shape Hillspire's next-generation data and AI platform as our Senior Data Engineer. You will architect and build cloud-native pipelines, batch, streaming, and GenAI-enabled that turn structured and unstructured data from finance, HR, philanthropy, ERP/CRM, documents, and logs into trusted, self-service insights. Leveraging modern data stacks and AI tools, you will drive advanced analytics, forecasting, and real-time dashboards while mentoring engineers and partnering closely with senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Unified Data & AI Platform: Architect and develop a lake-house stack, and Data management platform using tools such as Redshift or BigQuery, Airbyte, Airflow or similar.
• Streaming & Distributed Processing: Design real-time/streaming, and batch pipelines support event-driven analytics and near-instant insights, using tools such as Kafka, Spark or similar.
• End-to-End Pipelines: Build resilient ELT/ETL flows for relational data, semi-structured events, PDFs, images, and log streams, with automated testing, lineage, and governance.
• GenAI by Default: Embed AI in routine workflows via MCP servers: document intelligence, prompt-driven data-quality checks, automated documentation, AI code development, and conversational data exploration.
• Reporting & Dashboards: Deliver self-service semantic layers and pixel-perfect dashboards in Metabase, empowering stakeholders to explore data in real time.
• Advanced Analytics & Forecasting: Partner with Finance, HR, and Philanthropy to build predictive models, projections, and scenario analyses that guide budgeting, portfolio strategy, and grant outcomes.
• Stakeholder Partnership: Gather requirements, translate business logic into elegant data models, and evangelize best practices across on-shore/off-shore teams.
• Technical Mentorship & Governance: Set coding standards, review designs, and champion security, privacy, and cost-aware architecture.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science (or Equivalent experience).
• 7+ years designing and operating data platforms spanning structured and unstructured (documents, logs) workloads.
• Production expertise in data storage and processing pipelines with tools such as Prefect, Airbyte, Python, advanced SQL, cloud warehouses (Redshift or BigQuery), real-time streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, or Pub/Sub), and Data Monitoring & Governance tools (OpenMetadata).
• Mastery of dimensional and wide table data modeling, performance tuning.
• Demonstrated use of GenAI/LLMs for document processing, conversational analytics, or code generation.
• Hands-on experience building predictive models, time-series forecasts, scenario projections, and financial data analyses.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD (GitHub), containerization (Kubernetes/Helm), and infrastructure-as-code.
• Clear, concise communicator able to align technical architecture with executive strategy and inspire cross-functional teams.