Senior Data Engineer (AI-Native) — Data Layer
Job description
Senior Data Engineer to own and grow Proton's Data Layer, the unified foundation powering its products and AI brain. The role covers ingestion, medallion-style modeling (raw → refined → curated), and serving, built with heavy use of agentic AI coding tools.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Work mode
- Remote · Europe
- Languages
- English – C1
What you'll do
- Own the Data Layer end to end: ingestion from file-, event-, and API-based sources; the medallion-style model (raw → refined → curated); and the serving layer that powers the product and the AI brain
- Build and operate the ingestion and transformation pipelines that power the Data Layer, using a modern orchestration framework and cloud data warehouse
- Ingest and reconcile large, messy, real-world data across many source types and shapes — batch files, streaming events, and APIs
- Model data across medallion layers so it's trustworthy, queryable, and stable for downstream teams and the AI
- Help take the Data Layer to the next level — better architecture, better tooling, more scale, more sources
- Operate AI coding agents (Claude Code and similar) at a high level: scope work, structure context, run agents in parallel, and ship reviewed, production-quality output
- Build the systems that make data trustworthy — validation, reconciliation, lineage, backfills, idempotent and incremental loads
- Partner with backend, AI, and product engineers (and occasionally customers' IT teams) to define data contracts
What we're looking for
- 7+ years hands-on as a data engineer with real, demonstrable production ownership — pipelines and data models serving real users at scale
- Strong fundamentals: can read a query plan, reason about a slow or expensive pipeline, and debug a data-correctness bug to its root
- Strong programming and SQL skills; can model data for both transactional and analytical access patterns
- Hands-on orchestration experience, building reliable ingestion/ELT pipelines against messy upstream sources
- Experience with a cloud data warehouse and a major cloud platform
- Experience ingesting from multiple source types: file-based, event/streaming, and API-based
- Solid grasp of data-consistency failure modes — partial loads, late or out-of-order data, idempotency, backfills, schema drift
- Daily, hands-on use of agentic dev tools (Claude Code, Cursor agent mode, Codex, or equivalent) to ship real work
- Ownership and judgment: takes data systems from idea to production and exercises good taste on what to build and what to cut
- Startup mindset and strong communication — pragmatic, fast, biased to ship, able to explain data decisions in writing
- English at C1 or above
Nice to have
- Deep cloud data warehouse experience and modern transformation tooling
- Streaming / event ingestion at scale
- Medallion or lakehouse architecture experience on large, multi-source data
- Experience integrating enterprise sources such as ERP (Epicor Eclipse, Prophet 21) or ecommerce systems, and reconciling messy transactional data
- Building data systems that feed AI/ML or agentic products — serving/feature layers, retrieval, or data contracts for model inputs
- Prior experience at an early-stage SaaS startup
Your team
Data Layer
The unified foundation that every Proton product and the AI brain are built on.
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About Proton
The AI operating system for wholesale distribution
Proton is building the AI operating system for wholesale distribution, embedded in the workflows that move nearly every physical product on the planet. Distribution is a $9 trillion industry, and the software that runs it has been stuck in the past for decades. Hundreds of leading distributors — from family-owned shops to publicly-traded enterprises across industrial, HVAC, electrical — run on Proton.
Mission
Unify CRM, PIM, eCommerce AI, and Order & Quote Entry AI into one platform with one data layer and one AI brain, so reps spend their time deepening customer relationships, not entering data.
Key facts
- AI software for wholesale distribution
- Distribution is a $9 trillion industry
- Median Proton customer reports 3x profit return per dollar spent
- Hundreds of leading distributors run on Proton
- Backed by Felicis Ventures and Battery Ventures
Partners & customers
What they value
- High agency
- High urgency
- Everyone is a builder who owns problems end to end
- Ships AI-native software faster than anyone else in the category