Senior Data Engineer
at Earnest
United States (Remote)
Our mission is to make higher education accessible and affordable for everyone. We empower students with financial support and supercharge their ability to pay down their debt, so they can get on the right financial track, fast.
We build tools that help people feel in control of their financial future, including:
- Private student loans - low rates, people-first service, and flexible payments.
- Student loan refinancing - break free from high-interest rates or monthly payments.
- Scholarships - access to thousands of scholarships to help students pay less.
Earnies are committed to helping students live their best lives, free from the stress of student debt. If you’re as passionate as we are about our mission, read more below, and let’s build something great together!
Earnest LLC – Oakland, CA
Title: Senior Data Engineer
Duties:
- The Senior Data Engineer (Multiple Positions Open) at Earnest LLC in Oakland, CA will design and implement tooling and abstraction patterns for orchestrating transformations in Extract, Load, and Transform (ELT) processes by utilizing technologies such as Airflow and DBT.
- Develop CI/CD pipelines, troubleshoot, and identify and resolve defects through standard techniques such as debugging, profiling, logging, or log analysis.
- Design and implement integrations with third-party RESTful APIs to retrieve data and ingest it into the data warehouse, thereby enabling downstream analytical workflows and business intelligence initiatives.
- Develop ETL/ELT pipelines for ingesting data from internal and external services into the Data Lake and Data Warehouse, along with setting up ELT monitoring and alerting solutions to ensure system reliability and performance.
- Establish and maintain data infrastructure using Ansible and Terraform, provide technical leadership by guiding the team in selecting appropriate technologies, tools, and languages to address both technical and business challenges.
- Collaborate with analytics engineers, data analysts, and data scientists to support building and optimizing data pipelines for analytics and reporting.
- Cooperate with senior leadership to strategize and implement sustainable data architecture initiatives, as well as facilitating cross-functional requirements gathering sessions with engineering, product management, analytics, and data science teams to understand and fulfill data needs.
- Create and maintain detailed documentation for data engineering processes, including data ingestion, transformation, and storage, to ensure clarity and transparency within the team and among stakeholders.
- Document, break down, and estimate project planning in JIRA, provide estimates for project completion, and communicate acceptance criteria for project completion.
- Train other data engineers on ETL/ELT tooling, coach engineers on best practices for data exposure and storage in production, and provide feedback on coding and architecture via GitHub or through pair programming.
Position is 100% remote.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a closely
related field, plus 3 years of software development experience. - The 3 years of experience must include 3 years of experience with each of the following:
- (1) building and managing data pipelines, data warehouses, and backend services;
- (2) Python;
- (3) SQL;
- (4) OLTP databases, including Postgresql or MySQL;
- (5) OLAP databases, including Snowflake or BigQuery or Redshift;
- (6) AWS cloud technologies;
- (7) orchestration tools, including Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect;
- (8) container technologies, including Docker or Kubernetes;
- (9) server-side concepts;
- (10) building and maintaining REST APIs or Graphql for data transfer;
- (11) real-time data streaming using Kafka or Spark;
- (12) automating tasks with bash scripting;
- (13) data infrastructure provisioning using Terraform; and
- (14) code version control using Git.
This notice is subject to Earnest LLC's employee referral program.
Interested candidates can apply online at www.earnest.com/careers [earnest.com] or send a resume to
directrecruiting@earnest.com and reference job code 063.
A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location and budget. This range may be modified in the future.
Earnest believes in enabling our employees to live their best lives. We offer a variety of perks and competitive benefits, including:
- Health, Dental, & Vision benefits plus savings plans
- Mac computers + work-from-home stipend to set up your home office
- Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
- 401(k) plan to help you save for retirement plus a company match
- Robust tuition reimbursement program
- $1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary to anywhere in the world
- Competitive days of annual PTO
- Competitive parental leave
What Makes an Earnie:
At Earnest, our people bring our cultural principles to life. These principles define how we work, how we win, and what we expect of ourselves and each other:
- Every Second Counts: Speed is our competitive advantage. Our customers need better solutions, and the faster we execute, the greater our chance of success.
- Choose To Do Hard Things: We win by tackling the hard things that others avoid, fueled by grit and resilience.
- Pursue Excellence: Great companies, teams, and individuals never settle and are proud of the work that they do. What’s good enough today won’t be good enough tomorrow. Excellence isn’t a destination; it’s a mindset of continuous improvement.
- Lead Together: Our success comes from how we work together. Leadership is not about titles—it is about action. We take ownership, drive results, and move forward as a team.
- Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously: We take our work seriously, not ourselves. The stakes are high, but a sense of humor keeps us grounded, creative, and resilient.
At Earnest, we are committed to building an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging enables us to move forward with our mission. We are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage anyone to apply if your experience is close to what we are looking for.
Earnest provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or genetics. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for the position in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.