Staff Data Engineer, Engineering Foundation

About CookUnity

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Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 35 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.

Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.

The Team:

The Engineering Foundation team is a newly formed team responsible for ensuring the overall architecture supports the company’s rapid growth and provides an excellent experience for all CookUnity users.

We’re undertaking a large re-architecture of many systems across the engineering stack, and we’ll shape (and build) the future frameworks, technologies, and patterns for the rest of the engineering org to leverage.

The Role:

This is a rare opportunity to work at a rapid growth scaleup company and build on an entirely net new system to set the engineering foundation and principles across the org.

As a Staff Data Engineer on the Engineering Foundation team, you’ll play a critical role in defining the direction for the future of CookUnity’s data engineering architecture. You will design & build net new data pipelines and systems that form the future base of our B2C data engineering stack, and set in place best practices and patterns for the entire CookUnity data engineering org to adopt.

We’re looking for someone who’s excited about the prospect of taking an existing product that’s growing rapidly and helping to rebuild key components of our system. This will help set CookUnity up to scale gracefully for our next years of rapid growth, reduce overall system complexity, enable greater product experimentation, and enable product teams to build incredible features faster.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build net new resilient batch and real-time data pipelines that power critical products and drive rapid business growth.
• Design and build data pipelines facilitating the migration from existing disparate data models and data sources, into new data models and databases in production.
• Champion data reliability and performance by implementing proactive monitoring and quality-first engineering practices.
• Optimize data models to support fast, efficient decision-making across high-impact product and business use cases.
• Partner closely with product, engineering, and data science teams to quickly translate evolving business needs into scalable, production-ready data solutions.
• Shape the future of data engineering at scale, helping define the long-term roadmap and setting best practices as we grow.
• Coach and level up teammates, fostering a culture of learning, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Demonstrate strong self-direction and thrive in environments with high ambiguity, making sound decisions even when clear solutions are not readily apparent.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Proficient in Java, Scala, or Python, with deep expertise in data processing tech and in writing complex SQL queries.
• Proven track record of driving innovation within highly technical, distributed teams. You have driven complex projects to completion and are motivated by solving high-impact problems and building for the best user UX.
• Proven track record in designing, building, and operating robust distributed data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Spark, Flink, Kafka), and handling large data sets.
• Demonstrable experience of building, productionalizing, and optimizing real-time and batch data pipelines.

Preferred Requirements:

• Experience designing data architectures to power a variety of use cases, including enabling experimentation
• Be opinionated on engineering best practices and help contribute to our strong engineering culture.
• Experience with cloud-native technologies (Kubernetes, containers, etc).
• Past experience working in a rapid growth company or an early stage startup environment.
• A passion for food!

Benefits:

• Health Insurance coverage.
• 401k Plan.
• We grow, you grow: Stock Options Plan granted on Day 1.
• PTO policy and paid sick days / Unlimited PTO.
• 5- year Sabbatical: After 5 years with CookUnity, you get a 4-week paid sabbatical.
• Paid family leave.
• Compassionate Leave: 3-5 days each time the need arises.
• A generous amount of CookUnity credits to enjoy our amazing meals, added to your account, monthly.
• Wellness perks: access to a nutritional coach and fitness subsidies to build a healthy lifestyle.
• Personalized Spanish coach.
• Awesome opportunity to join a company that is looking to change how we eat and how chefs work!

Learn More About CookUnity:

We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we’re looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale.

We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we’d love to connect!

Compensation

All final pay rates will be determined by candidates experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data.

Pay Range for this position

$180,000 - $204,000 USD

If you’re interested in this role, please submit your application and if we think you might be a fit, we'll get in touch with you. Thank you for your time!

CookUnity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or physical or mental disability.