Senior Data Engineer

About Safetrust

Safetrust is building the future of identity.

Imagine a world where your phone, wearable, or digital credential becomes your secure key—unlocking buildings, systems, and experiences seamlessly across physical and digital environments.

That’s what we do.

Our platform combines IoT devices, mobile credentials, and cloud-native architecture to power secure access for Fortune 200 companies and global enterprises.

As we evolve from a hardware-centric model to a platform and services-driven business, marketing plays a critical role in shaping how the market understands—and adopts—Safetrust.

About the role:

The Senior Data Engineer is responsible for the performance, efficiency, and scalability of Safetrust’s databases, data warehouse, and data pipelines. This is a specialized, individual contributor role focused on performance tuning, ensuring that our data systems run fast, reliably, and cost-effectively as data volumes and usage grow.

Working alongside our software engineering and dev ops teams with a high degree of ownership, the Senior Data Engineer will diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks across SQL queries, database workloads, and ETL/ELT jobs – from investigation and benchmarking through to implementation and validation. The position is critical in supporting Safetrust’s continued growth by improving system responsiveness, reducing platform costs, and keeping our data infrastructure ready to scale.

Key Responsibilities:

Query & Database Performance Tuning

• Analyze and optimize resource-intensive SQL queries and database workloads using execution plans and profiling.
• Tune relational databases through indexing, partitioning, statistics, and configuration, and resolve locking and concurrency issues.
• Validate every improvement through before/after benchmarking to ensure measurable gains with no regression.

Data Pipeline Performance

• Identify and resolve bottlenecks in existing ETL/ELT pipelines affecting throughput, latency, and data freshness.
• Optimize jobs through incremental loading, efficient transformation logic, and improved scheduling.
• Test and deploy performance changes safely, with minimal disruption to downstream reports and applications.

Performance Monitoring & Reporting

• Establish performance baselines, KPIs, and monitoring/alerting for critical queries, databases, and pipelines.
• Proactively detect performance degradation and lead root-cause analysis for performance-related incidents.
• Document tuning changes and best practices, and communicate findings and recommendations to stakeholders.

Skills & Experience:

• 5+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Database Engineering, or Database Administration, with a strong focus on performance tuning and optimization
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Expert-level SQL skills, with proven experience reading execution plans and optimizing complex queries on large datasets
• Experience optimizing ETL/ELT pipelines and working with orchestration/transformation tools (e.g., dbt, Airflow, or similar); proficiency in Python
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools for databases and data systems
• Proven track record of independently diagnosing and resolving performance issues in production environments
• Hands-on experience tuning Snowflake (preferred) or similar cloud data platforms such as BigQuery, Databricks, or Redshift, including warehouse tuning and cost management, is a plus.
• Experience in SaaS, IoT, cybersecurity, identity management, or access control industries is a plus
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and organizational skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English
• Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced, global environment

Success Profile:

The ideal candidate is:

• Self-directed and highly accountable – able to own work end-to-end with minimal supervision
• Performance-obsessed and data-driven – measures before and after, and lets evidence guide optimization decisions
• Hands-on and detail-oriented, comfortable going deep into query plans, database internals, and platform settings
• Able to translate technical findings into clear, prioritized recommendations for both technical and business stakeholders
• Comfortable working across regions and functions in a global environment

Impact of the Role:

Within 12–18 months, success in this role will be measured by:

• First 6–12 months: Establish performance and cost baselines across critical queries, databases, and pipelines; resolve the highest-impact bottlenecks with measurable improvements in run time, data freshness, and platform cost; work alongside DevOps to put performance monitoring and alerting in place
• Longer-term impact: Sustain consistently fast and stable data systems as data volumes and usage grow; reduce performance-related incidents; establish documented performance standards adopted across engineering, setup workflows involving big data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, etc
• This role contributes to a more responsive product experience, faster and more reliable reporting, and more efficient use of platform spend.

Safetrust is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We offer an inclusive workplace and will not tolerate discrimination against any job candidate or employee due to age, race, religion, color, ethnicity, national origin, gender, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, membership in an employee organization, medical condition, family history, genetic information, veteran status, marital status or parental status.