Data Engineer

About us

• At Sierra, we’re creating a platform to help businesses build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices in Atlanta, New York, and London.
• We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.
• Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.

What you'll do

• Sierra is in the process of building out its core data foundations, and you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the company’s data strategy and infrastructure. Partnering with engineering, product, and GTM teams, you’ll design and operate scalable batch and real-time data systems, create trusted data models, and build the pipelines that power experimentation, analytics, and AI development.
• You’ll ensure that every area of the business—from customer experience to go-to-market execution—has access to high-quality, reliable data to drive insight and innovation. Beyond infrastructure, you’ll influence how data is captured, governed, and leveraged across Sierra, empowering decision-making at scale.
• This is a unique opportunity to establish the foundations of Sierra’s data ecosystem, drive standards for reliability and trust, and enable the next generation of AI-powered customer interactions.

What you'll bring

• Proven Experience: Extensive experience in data engineering, with a track record of designing and operating data pipelines, systems, and models at scale.
• Curiosity & Customer Obsession: Passion for building trustworthy data systems that empower teams to better understand users and deliver impactful product experiences.
• Adaptability and Resilience: Comfort working in a fast-paced startup environment, able to adapt to evolving priorities and deliver reliable solutions amidst ambiguity.
• Technical Proficiency: Strong proficiency in SQL and Python, with expertise in distributed data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Flink, Kafka) and cloud-based platforms (AWS, GCP).
• Data Architecture Skills: Deep experience with data modeling, warehousing, and designing schemas optimized for analytics, experimentation, and AI/ML workloads.
• Data Quality & Governance: Strong understanding of data validation, monitoring, compliance, and best practices for ensuring data integrity across pipelines.
• Excellent Communication: Ability to translate technical infrastructure and data design trade-offs into clear recommendations for product, engineering, and business stakeholders.
• Great Collaboration: Proven ability to partner closely with product, ML, analytics, and GTM teams to deliver data foundations that unlock business and product innovation.

Even better...

• Experience with (open to equivalents) - AWS Glue, Athena, Kafka, Flink/Spark, dbt, Airflow/Dagster, Terraform.
• Experience working with large language models (LLMs), conversational AI, or agent-based systems.
• Familiarity with building or improving data platforms for advanced analytics.

Our values

• Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.
• Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.
• Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.
• Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.
• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

• Flexible (Unlimited) Paid Time Off
• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
• Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
• Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension) with Sierra match
• Parental Leave
• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
• Discretionary Benefit Stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.