Staff Software Engineer - Data Engineering

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Data Engineering About Us Todyl puts world-class networking and security within reach of every business. The Todyl Security Platform converges SASE, SIEM, Endpoint Security, GRC, MXDR, and more into a cloud-native, single-agent platform built for MSPs, MSSPs, and mid-market IT professionals. We are on a mission to protect small and medium-sized businesses from ever-changing cyber threats, and we are a fast-paced team that cares deeply about carrying out that mission together. About the Role The Data team at Todyl owns the systems that turn high-volume security telemetry into something the rest of the platform and our partners can act on. We design and operate the ingestion pipelines, storage, and search and analytics layer that power detection, investigation, and the business intelligence our AI/ML and product teams build on. Our work is judged by how reliably and quickly data lands, stays correct, and stays queryable at scale, not by how many tickets we close. This is a staff-level individual contributor role and the technical anchor for the Data team. You will set the technical direction for our data ingestion and storage systems, own the most complex and ambiguous initiatives end-to-end, and operate as a multiplier who raises the capability of the whole team. You will work as a peer to Architecture and to the AI/ML and product teams on decisions that shape how Todyl handles data over the next several years, and you will be the person other engineers go to when a problem is too hard or too ambiguous for anyone else to resolve. This is a technical leadership role, not a people-management one. In this role, we are looking for someone who: - Operates as a technical authority whose work impacts the entire Data team and the teams that depend on it. Owns complex, ambiguous initiatives and sets technical direction, thinking 12 months and more ahead. - Has a strong sense of ownership and stays with the work through stabilization, not just through a successful deploy. They own systems through their full lifecycle and don't leave work at 90 percent. - Acts as a multiplier: unblocks others, establishes best practices and architectural patterns that get adopted across teams, and raises the capability of the team through mentorship and knowledge sharing. - Designs for multi-year horizons and graceful degradation, anticipates scaling challenges before they arise, and considers total cost of ownership and operational simplicity in their designs. - Debugs cross-system issues that others cannot resolve, and stays current on industry trends while evaluating their relevance to Todyl's needs. - Communicates technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to engineers, engineering leadership, and non-technical stakeholders, including risks and mitigation plans to leadership proactively, and is comfortable saying no or pushing back constructively when it matters. - Quantifies the business impact of their technical work, makes decisions with business priorities explicitly in mind, and advocates for the team's technical needs. - Actively uses AI tooling in their day-to-day work and influences how the team adopts AI patterns safely. - Thrives in a fast-paced startup environment and is comfortable adapting existing systems to fast-changing requirements. What you will do: - You will set the technical direction for Todyl's data ingestion and storage systems, owning complex, multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguous problem statement through stabilization, and breaking that ambiguity into achievable milestones. - You will architect and implement scalable, reliable data storage and ingestion solutions, evaluate complex trade-offs across performance, scale, security, and maintainability, and present those trade-offs to leadership when they affect direction. - You will establish the architectural principles, patterns, and quality and observability standards that the rest of the Data team adopts, and you will build monitoring, alerting, and debugging into your designs so we catch correctness and freshness issues early and drive down time to detect and resolve. - You will design and implement data ingestion pipelines that pull from many sources into our search and analytics platform (Quickwit, with Elasticsearch in our history) for real-time analytics, search, and visualization, optimized for scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance under high volume and velocity. - You will operate as a peer to Architecture and to the AI/ML and product teams, partnering at the design phase of high-stakes systems rather than reviewing them the week before launch, delivering format-appropriate data for business intelligence initiatives, and integrating pipelines into the portal so end users get seamless access and visualization. - You will act as a multiplier for the Data team: mentor and uplevel engineers through pairing, design partnership, and code review, with measurable improvement in their autonomy, and lead thorough design reviews. - You will participate in the team's on-call rotation, resolve the issues others cannot, and follow up on incidents and the toil they expose rather than leaving work unfinished. - You will estimate complex multi-quarter work, identify cross-team dependencies and risks during planning, propose mitigations, and communicate delays and risks to leadership early. - You will reduce technical debt across multiple initiatives, own systems through their full lifecycle, and look for ways to hand off or make mature systems self-managing rather than holding onto them forever. - You will treat code review and testing as quality levers, not checkboxes. You design inherently testable systems with comprehensive coverage, prevent architectural mistakes before they happen, and watch dashboards and logs to verify your own changes after they ship. Important note: We expect the person in this role to actively use AI tools, including tools like Claude, to accelerate development, reduce toil, and solve data engineering problems more quickly. At the staff level, we also expect you to influence how the team adopts AI tooling: sharing patterns that work, flagging patterns that don't, and helping the team integrate AI safely into design, review, and incident workflows. We will talk about how you use AI in your work during the interview, and we expect your fluency with these tools to grow as part of your professional development here. We do not expect deep knowledge across every item below, but familiarity with several of these will help you ramp quickly. Most importantly, we are looking for a strong technical background, the willingness to learn what you do not already know, and demonstrated experience setting technical direction and building data systems at meaningful scale. - 8+ years of end-to-end commercial software and application development - 3+ years of commercial software development for a multi-tenant cloud platform - Demonstrated experience owning complex, ambiguous initiatives end-to-end and setting technical direction for a team - Go and JavaScript, and software development under Linux or Unix-based systems - Python and SQL for data work - Data ingestion and streaming pipelines under high volume and velocity - Data storage and modeling: relational and columnar stores, data warehouses, and search and analytics engines (Quickwit, Elasticsearch) - AWS and cloud-native, multi-tenant infrastructure - Observability for data systems (Grafana, Prometheus) - Git and modern development workflows What We Offer For full-time employees, Todyl offers comprehensive benefits including: - Medical, dental, and vision coverage - Health savings and flexible spending accounts (HSA/FSA) - Life insurance - Short- and long-term disability - Access to on-demand healthcare and telehealth services - Employee Assistance Program (EAP) - Flexible PTO in addition to 13 company holidays - 401(k) - Generous parental leave programs This role is based in Denver, CO, with 3 days per week in our office. The actual annual salary for this role will depend on each candidate's experience, qualifications, and work location, with most new hires placed near the midpoint of the posted range to ensure fairness and consistency across our team. Todyl provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, transgender status, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, marital status, genetic information, military status, or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws. We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all the requirements listed. We are looking for the best person for the job, someone who brings a unique combination of skills and experience that makes them exceptional, even if they don't check every box.