Senior Data Platform Engineer

Purple Wave Auction is a leader in the equipment auction industry focusing on construction, ag, fleet, and government equipment. They are seeking a seasoned Senior Data Platform Engineer to design and operate data pipelines, services, and data products, while providing technical guidance and mentorship to the data team.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to technical direction and strategic planning at the team level
• Evaluate and recommend new technologies and approaches for backend and AI/ML evolution
• Provide technical guidance and code reviews for team members
• Provide technical guidance and support to product teams consuming backend services
• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines and ETL/ELT workflows that ingest, move, and transform data across source systems, the warehouse, and downstream consumers
• Develop and maintain dbt models, tests, and documentation to support analytics, reporting, and product features
• Build and operate workflow orchestration for batch and streaming data (scheduling, dependency management, retries, and alerting)
• Establish and enforce data quality, reliability, and observability practices across pipelines (monitoring, lineage, freshness, and validation)
• Implement schema management, versioning, and migration patterns to evolve data models safely
• Optimize pipeline performance, cost, and scalability across the data platform
• Design, develop, and maintain microservices in Python; familiarity with Go and/or TypeScript/JavaScript is a plus
• Design and build APIs and services that integrate LLMs and ML models — including retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, prompt orchestration, tool/function calling, and agentic workflows
• Develop self-service tools and APIs that enable product teams to independently leverage backend and AI capabilities
• Establish patterns for safely, reliably, and cost-effectively operating LLM- and ML-backed features in production (evaluation, observability, guardrails, fallbacks)
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
• Create and maintain technical documentation and standards repositories
• Work within an Agile framework to prioritize and deliver backend improvements
• Collaborate with product teams and stakeholders to understand requirements and pain points
• Help foster a culture of continuous learning, improvement, and technical excellence
• Encourage adoption of consistent tooling and processes across development teams
• Contribute to cross-team initiatives to improve developer experience and backend consistency
• Undertake additional assigned duties as requested

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, OR 6+ years of professional software development experience in lieu of degree
• 5+ years of backend software development experience
• 2+ years of experience in technical leadership or mentoring roles
• Expert proficiency in Python
• Practical experience integrating LLMs or ML models into production systems — including at least several of: prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings/vector search, tool/function calling, evaluation, and cost/latency optimization
• Advanced experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating RESTful APIs at scale
• Advanced pipeline design and implementation using industry best practices and tools
• Experience with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Proven experience building and scaling backend services and APIs
• Deep understanding of microservice architecture patterns, distributed systems, and best practices
• Experience with observability tools and practices (monitoring, logging, tracing) — including for AI/ML workloads where applicable
• Strong ability to communicate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
• Strong customer-focused mindset with emphasis on the developer and end-user experience
• Experience facilitating technical discussions and building consensus
• Demonstrated experience providing technical guidance
• Candidates may be requested to complete position specific skills assessments
• Applicants must be either a U.S. Citizen or eligible to work in the U.S
• Requires the ability to satisfactorily complete a background check
• Familiarity with Go and/or TypeScript/JavaScript is a plus
• Familiarity with vector databases (e.g., pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate) is a plus
• Spanish speaking bi-lingual candidates are encouraged to apply