Senior Staff Data Engineer

About the Role

IAA is seeking a Senior Staff Data Engineer to be a senior individual contributor and technical leader within our data engineering function. This is a hands-on, deeply technical role for an engineer who designs and builds complex, business-critical components of IAA’s data platform, drives architectural decisions within their area, and raises the engineering bar across the team.

The Senior Staff Data Engineer owns the design and delivery of major systems and data products, partners with the Director on platform-wide architecture and standards, and leads execution on significant, often ambiguous initiatives. This person leads through technical depth, strong execution, and influence rather than headcount, acting as a multiplier for the engineers around them.

This role partners closely with engineering leadership, data scientists, BI developers, platform/infrastructure teams, and business stakeholders across Operations, Sales, Marketing, and Product.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build major data systems, pipelines, frameworks, and reusable components, owning architecture within your area and contributing to platform-wide design alongside the Director Data Engineering.
• Personally deliver complex, high-impact data engineering work on IAA’s Azure data and analytics stack — ingestion, transformation, storage, semantic modeling, and data delivery.
• Apply and help refine engineering standards and patterns across code quality, performance, scalability, observability, and governance, and drive their adoption through example and code/design review.
• Build robust pipelines, semantic models, and data products that power dashboards, self-service analytics, forecasting, and downstream machine learning systems.
• Build the production-grade data pipelines and feature/data infrastructure that data scientists rely on to train, serve, and operationalize models.
• Diagnose and resolve difficult performance, reliability, and scalability challenges across BI and data workloads (e.g., Power BI, Synapse, Fabric).
• Contribute to technical strategy across Microsoft Fabric, Synapse, Power BI, and broader Azure BI technologies, helping evaluate new tools and inform build/buy decisions.
• Mentor data engineers and analytics engineers, conducting design reviews and helping elevate the technical capability of the team.
• Serve as a technical partner to engineering leadership on data architecture and technical tradeoffs within your scope.
• Translate complex business problems into practical, scalable, and well-architected data solutions.

What We’re Looking For

• Extensive hands-on experience as a senior or staff-level data engineer, with a track record of designing and delivering production data systems at scale.
• Deep expertise across the Azure BI / data technology stack, including:
• Microsoft Fabric
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• Power BI and semantic modeling
• Broader Azure data and analytics services
• Strong command of data engineering architecture, modern analytics platforms, dimensional and semantic modeling, and scalable, fault-tolerant pipelines.
• Expert-level proficiency in Python and SQL, with strong software engineering fundamentals (testing, version control, CI/CD, modular design).
• Working understanding of how data scientists consume data, enough to build the pipelines and feature/data infrastructure that support model training and serving.
• Demonstrated ability to solve ambiguous, complex problems through robust technical design and pragmatic execution.
• Strong mentoring and influence skills — able to elevate engineering practices and lead technically within a team.
• Excellent communication skills; able to explain complex technical concepts and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical partners across Ops, Business, Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, high-visibility environment with multiple priorities and stakeholders.

Preferred Experience

• Experience building data platforms supporting enterprise use cases across operations, commercial functions, and product-driven organizations.
• Experience spanning both BI modernization and data platform enablement for analytics and ML within the same platform.
• Familiarity with cloud-native engineering practices, infrastructure-as-code, and secure, scalable data environments.
• Experience contributing to platform-wide standards and reference architectures used across multiple teams.
• Experience building data pipelines that support RAG, LLM, or modern AI workloads on enterprise data.

Why This Role Matters

The Senior Staff Data Engineer is a key technical leader within IAA’s data engineering organization. This person builds and scales the systems that enable better decisions, improved business performance, operational efficiencies, and a durable competitive advantage. Through hands-on engineering, strong design, and influence, this role directly impacts both technical direction and business outcomes across the organization.