Staff Data Engineer - GRC Enablement (OLTP)

Workiva is a platform company that unifies finance, risk, and sustainability data on a secure foundation. The Staff Data Engineer will build and own GRC transactional data foundations, including Postgres schemas, OLTP data models, migrations, and CDC/extraction pipelines feeding OLAP systems. The role also includes establishing data standards, ensuring reliability and compliance, optimizing queries, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Design, review, and evolve Postgres schemas for GRC product services, balancing normalization, query performance, and application ergonomics
• Set standards for indexing, constraints, partitioning, and connection pooling; identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in production
• Own migration strategy and tooling (schema changes, backfills, zero-downtime deploys) across services
• Own change-data-capture and extraction: what leaves Postgres, in what shape, on what cadence, and how upstream schema changes are communicated before they break downstream models
• Define the data contract at the landing zone with the OLAP specialist so extraction output is stable and well-documented; you own upstream reliability, they own what happens after landing
• Where dbt/ETL logic sits closer to source-of-truth semantics (e.g., early-stage transaction or history-mart models), collaborate with the OLAP specialist to determine ownership on a per-project basis, documented explicitly rather than left implicit
• Establish relational modeling patterns and review standards so engineers build consistent, maintainable schemas
• Optimize SQL for transactional workloads (query plans, indexing strategy, lock contention, multi-join performance at scale)
• Define data contracts between services so schema changes don't silently break consumers, including downstream OLAP consumers
• Implement data integrity checks, replication/failover practices, and monitoring for transactional data health and extraction pipelines
• Work within regulated release pipelines using GitOps/CI/CD; manage schema and pipeline promotions through dev/test/prod with gated approvals
• Apply RBAC, audit logging, and encryption standards aligned with Workiva's information-protection policies, at the OLTP layer and extraction layer specifically
• Establish schema design patterns, SQL coding standards, and documentation so engineers can confidently build against Postgres without escalating every decision
• Mentor engineers on relational modeling, query optimization, and transactional system fundamentals; lead incident resolution and root-cause analysis for production data issues, including extraction failures
• Partner with the OLAP specialist to define and document where responsibility splits, and revisit that boundary as the platform matures
• Partner with the platform data team on infrastructure decisions (warehouse provisioning, streaming infra, CI/CD tooling) while retaining ownership of GRC-specific schema design, modeling standards, and data quality outcomes; this team owns the "what and how" of GRC data models, platform data team owns the "on what infrastructure."

Requirements:

• 5+ years in data engineering or backend engineering with hands-on ownership of production Postgres (or comparable relational OLTP) systems
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
• Expert-level SQL and strong understanding of query planning, indexing strategy, and transactional isolation levels
• Proven experience owning schema design and migrations for production Postgres services at scale
• Experience building CDC/extraction pipelines (Debezium, Kafka Connect, or similar) feeding a cloud warehouse
• Experience in regulated or highly controlled environments with strict release governance and compliance requirements
• Familiarity with connection pooling (PgBouncer or similar), replication, and backup/recovery strategy
• Working knowledge of dbt sufficient to collaborate on shared models, even if dbt isn't your primary tool
• Track record of mentoring engineers and driving cross-team technical standards