Software Engineer II - Data Platform

Latitude AI develops automated driving technologies, including L3, for Ford vehicles at scale. The Software Engineer II - Data Platform role involves building and evolving a high-performance cloud-native stack, abstracted data frameworks, and custom tooling to enhance data handling and processing capabilities for the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Work with a blend of serverless cloud analytics tools and self-hosted Kubernetes deployments to serve a diverse range of internal stakeholders
• Develop internal tooling that enables engineers to self-serve data loading and testing
• Work on systems capable of handling high-throughput, low-latency streaming and massively parallel bulk loads scaling to hundreds of terabytes daily
• Provide guidance/documentation on usage
• Deploy and scale industry-leading data engineering and analytics tools
• Deploying and extending OS solutions such as dbt, Airflow and Superset
• Provide the automation and cataloging tools that serve as the backbone for discovery and tracing
• Enable a well-documented data front ready for both human exploration and LLM/RAG-based consumption

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics or a related field and 2+ years of relevant experience, Master's degree, or PhD
• Strong Python development skills with a focus on SOLID design principles. You have experience managing the full lifecycle of internal packages, from intake and design to release and maintenance
• Experience managing cloud infrastructure via Infrastructure as Code (IaC). You should be comfortable with Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, and observability via Grafana or similar
• Understanding of SQL and OLAP concepts. You are familiar with the architecture of Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) systems (e.g., BigQuery, Redshift, or ClickHouse) and understand how to optimize for both performance and cost. Experience with dbt is a plus
• Familiarity with data orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Dagster) and a conceptual understanding of distributed stream processing (e.g., the Apache Beam model). You should understand challenges like watermarks, stateful processing, and temporal consistency
• You are a product-minded engineer. You have the empathy to understand the pain points of your fellow engineers and the drive to build tools that are actually useful. You maintain a high bar for quality while prioritizing high-impact delivery
• A standard-bearer for CI/CD excellence. You understand how to build robust Jenkins or GitHub Actions pipelines that automate testing, linting, and deployment, ensuring a high-velocity but safe development environment
• Experience with end-to-end security and isolation. You understand the importance of least-privilege access, service account management, and automated data anonymization/governance