Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer

At the COOL company, we believe in creating a win-win environment where everyone benefits. We are committed to ensuring users, publishers, franchisees, and advertisers all have a better experience and achieve more than they ever thought possible through our innovation, advanced AI, groundbreaking advertising technology, and teams of inspired experts. Our every move, expansion, acquisition, and upgrade is done to provide that better experience for an ever-growing list of satisfied clients and users all over the world.

Brands under the COOL company include ADventori, a data-driven, creative ad server capable of personalizing, automating, measuring, and optimizing digital ads and placements for advertisers; Balihoo, a complete advertising management platform for franchise and network businesses; COOL Media, a managed service solution for agencies and brands to reach and measure audiences; Insticator, a premier SSP and engagement platform for publishers; and OKO Digital, delivering website and app publishers everything they need to maximize their ad revenue.

Collectively, the COOL company reaches over 350 million consumers monthly across their network of premium publishers and advertisers, including Disney, Hyundai, Air France, Kohler, Suzuki, Acer, Pearle Vision, Trek, Brita, Viking Cruises, MLB, Playmaker, Blitz, Evolve Media, and more. Under the former umbrella of Insticator, the COOL company is a proud 7x recipient of the Inc 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies, a 2x recipient of Deloitte's Fast 500, recognized on Crain's New York Fast 50 list, recognized by Digiday's Digiday Media Awards as a company working to modernize digital media, and awarded as one of AdWeek's Top 10 Fastest Growing Solution Providers globally.

Our Core Values

At the COOL company, we believe in being C.O.O.L.:

• Creative - we look to find solutions that others can't and new ways of doing things that are smarter, faster, better and more efficient.
• Open-minded - we're always evolving and keep an open mind as to new ways of doing things, new solutions and new processes that can help us.
• Optimistic - The glass is always half full :) as a growing tech startup we're always faced with new challenges, we overcome them because we see them as opportunities.
• Leaders - we look for drivers, people who like to set the pace of the organization, who don't simply go with the flow, you're setting a fast impact pace and holding others to it. We look for speed, impact, and setting the industry benchmark.

We creatively integrate new elements in innovative combinations, fueled by our optimism to drive success. Our open-mindedness allows us to embrace new ideas and approaches, empowering us to lead our industry through bold initiatives. That's the attitude we bring to work with us every day, and it's what we expect from everyone who works here.

That's just part of the values that drive us to greatness. We also believe in this trio of truths that inform every decision we make and everything we do:

• Sleeves Up: At the COOL company, we provide you with the autonomy and creativity needed to own your role. We encourage iteration where necessary so that you can drive massive impact.
• 100% Viewability: the COOL company is passionate about open feedback at all levels of the company. This allows us to fail fast, create in real-time, and build an open company culture.
• Be Defiantly Great: We're defiant, and that's in our blood. Challenging the status quo is a central part of who we are. We're capable of much more than what others deem impossible.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join our fast-paced and evolving engineering organization. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you'll work directly with engineers and data scientists to scale and modernize our data infrastructure. You'll be expected to take ownership of existing pipelines built on Snowflake, Druid, and Airflow, while also designing and implementing new end-to-end pipelines to support next-generation products and initiatives. This role requires deep technical expertise, proactive collaboration, and a strong sense of urgency.

Challenges and Opportunities for the position

In this role, you'll be expected to quickly ramp up on our existing data infrastructure and take ownership of critical pipelines across Snowflake, Druid, Airflow, and AWS. You'll have the opportunity to architect and build new pipelines from scratch to support emerging products and machine learning initiatives. The role requires managing large-scale, high-velocity datasets and solving complex real-time and batch processing challenges. You'll work closely with cross-functional teams—including product, engineering, and data science—to align priorities and move fast. As a senior engineer, you'll help shape data and infrastructure decisions, balancing strong technical opinions with a collaborative mindset. You'll also operate within a hybrid cloud environment that blends AWS and dedicated servers, with a constant focus on reliability, cost-efficiency, and scalability. Finally, you'll play a key role in establishing best practices for observability, fault tolerance, and operational excellence across the data stack.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Own and improve existing ETL/ELT pipelines and data models; ensure they are efficient, reliable, and well-documented.
• Design and implement new data pipelines and infrastructure to support product engineers and data scientists.
• Architect data workflows to support both real-time and batch use cases using Airflow or similar orchestration tools.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to understand data needs and translate them into scalable solutions.
• Monitor, maintain, and improve data quality and reliability across the entire stack.
• Ensure data governance, security, and compliance best practices are followed. Build observability into all data systems through robust alerting, logging, and metrics.
• Conduct performance tuning and cost optimization for data pipelines running in Snowflake, Druid, AWS, and beyond.

Qualifications

Professional competencies

• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable data pipelines and infrastructure.
• Strong SQL and data modeling skills; deep experience with Snowflake or similar cloud data warehouses.
• Proficiency with orchestration tools like Airflow and scripting languages like Python.
• Experience with AWS cloud services (e.g., EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS) and working with dedicated server environments.
• Solid understanding of real-time and batch data processing; Druid experience is a big plus.
• Strong understanding of modern data architecture principles (data lake, data mesh, etc.).
• Proven ability to operate end-to-end: requirements gathering, development, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Prioritizes speed and impact, while maintaining good engineering practices around refactoring, testing, and observability.
• Experience with big data frameworks such as Spark, Kafka, or Presto is a plus.
• Familiarity with visualization tools like Looker, Tableau, or Superset.
• Ad tech experience or familiarity with SSPs, DSPs, RTB, or DMPs is a strong plus.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, able to work across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Opinionated yet open-minded—willing to challenge assumptions and adapt to changing priorities.

Cultural Competencies

• Must be able to work primarily between the hours of 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM ET
• Must have a player/coach mentality, willing to both execute and lead
• Ability to juggle multiple projects concurrently and set and meet deadlines
• Skilled at receiving and providing direct feedback
• Collaborative mindset and great teamwork skills
• Entrepreneurial & adaptable; great learning skills
• Curious, research-minded, data-informed
• Able to search for possible solutions and apply them
• Creative confidence
• Proactive communicator
• A sense of humor and a love of online culture
• Thrives in a start-up culture