Staff Data Engineer

AppFolio is hiring a Staff Data Engineer for its Business Data Platform team. The role owns the platform’s operational infrastructure, observability, CI/CD, data security and governance, and supports reliable, secure data access for analytics, AI, and business decision-making.

Responsibilities:

• Own the design, build, and maintenance of AppFolio's Business Data Platform's observability and testing solutions that identify reliability, scalability, or data quality issues and strive to continuously improve the platform
• Own the CI/CD architecture for our Github repositories — build the automated checks, deployment pipelines, and orchestration that every team's changes run through, and keep that platform running as new teams and use cases plug into it
• Manage service accounts, roles, and permissions across Snowflake, dbt, and BI tools
• Own the creation of and performance of Data Pipeline SLOs
• Create and enforce data access controls, masking policies, and encryption standards (at rest and in transit)
• Define and own access governance for AI-driven data consumption — scoping Snowflake Coco, MCP server, and agent tool access (e.g., Chat-to-Data) with least-privilege, read-by-default, and full audit logging as agents take on more direct data access
• Partner with InfoSec and Compliance to ensure auditability and privacy frameworks are implemented and upheld across the Business Data Platform
• Maintain lineage and metadata documentation across key data domains
• Implement and manage infrastructure-as-code for data platform components
• Drive automation of routine operations (e.g., environment provisioning, credential rotation, usage monitoring)
• Partner with data engineers, data science engineers, data scientists, and analysts to improve platform usability and self-service capabilities
• Document and evangelize best practices for data access, job orchestration, and environment management

Requirements:

• 8+ years in DataOps, Data Platform Engineering, DevOps, or related roles within modern cloud data environments
• Proficiency in data engineering tools and technologies - SQL, Python, Airflow, Mulesoft, Linux scripting, and dbt
• Strong Experience with cloud technology, especially AWS tech stack (s3, ec2, eks), Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience with cloud data warehouse technology, such as Snowflake, including data security and governance
• Advanced proficiency with Airflow
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, codespaces, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform etc.)
• Experience with building self-serve processes
• Familiarity with security standards and practices for data (IAM, encryption, audit logging)
• Familiar with Snowflake RBAC, object privileges, masking policies, row-access policies, and secure UDFs/SPROCs to support both data engineering and ML/AI workloads