Staff Engineer Data

Paylocity is an award-winning provider of cloud-based HR and payroll software solutions, offering the most complete platform for the modern workforce. The company has become one of the fastest-growing HCM software providers worldwide by offering an intuitive, easy-to-use product suite that helps businesses automate and streamline HR and payroll processes, attract and retain talent, and build a strong workplace culture.

While traditional HR and payroll providers automate basic HR processes such as payroll and benefits administration, Paylocity goes further by developing tools that HR and businesses need to compete for talent and deliver against the expectations of the modern workforce.

We give our employees what they need to succeed, including great benefits and perks! We offer medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and a 401(k) match, as well as perks that support you, your family, and your finances. And if it’s career development you desire, we provide that, too! At Paylocity, people matter most and have always been at the heart of our business.

Help Paylocity enhance communication and enable employees to connect, collaborate, and create from anywhere with a position in Product & Technology!

Want to develop the strategies and principles needed to deliver compelling software? Join our team and help us enhance our all-in-one software platform, elevate our one-of-a-kind technology, and improve the employee experience?

Take your career to the next level at one of G2's Top 100 Software Companies. Explore our Product & Technology positions to see where you fit!

This is a fully remote position, allowing you to work from home or location of record within the U.S. with no in-office requirements. You must be available five days per week during designated work hours. The work arrangement for this role is subject to change based on business needs and individual performance. This may include adjustments to on-site requirements.

Staff Engineer Data 

Position Overview 

The Staff Data Engineer is a senior technical individual contributor responsible for designing and implementing scalable, resilient data systems that support enterprise reporting and analytics. This role operates with enterprise data platform awareness and provides advisory input into organizational architecture decisions that impact or connect to the data platform. The Staff Data Engineer floats between teams to accelerate ambiguous, high-impact projects, drive reusability through shared patterns and standards, and owns operational health outcomes in the areas they influence. 

Primary Responsibilities 

The below represents the primary duties of the position, others may be assigned as needed. To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. 

• Design, build, and evolve scalable, secure, and resilient data platform capabilities that support enterprise reporting, analytics, and downstream consumers including BI and ML/AI solutions. 
• Develop and maintain ELT pipelines, analytical and reporting data models, and curated datasets optimized for reliability, performance, and reuse. 
• Write modular, well-architected, maintainable code designed for reuse across teams (shared libraries, templates, reference implementations). 
• Apply scalability, reliability, and distributed-systems thinking to production data workloads (idempotency, retries, backpressure, failure isolation, recovery). 
• Always think in terms of architecture for your domain and beyond; connect local decisions to platform-wide patterns and downstream consumers. 
• Float between teams to accelerate vague or ambiguous initiatives, reduce duplication, and increase reuse through shared capabilities and standards. 
• Provide advisory input into organizational and system architecture decisions that impact or integrate with the data platform. 
• Identify, advocate for, and complete high-impact coding projects (e.g., refactoring, simplification, platform hardening) that reduce technical debt and increase leverage. 
• Own and be accountable for large project features end-to-end, including design, delivery, rollout, reliability, and cost awareness. 
• Own health when issues arise or costs spike in areas you’re working around/with; lead triage, drive root-cause analysis, and land preventive fixes. 
• Proactively identify risks and issues (correctness, reliability, security, cost, delivery); communicate early and mitigate through design and execution. 
• Demonstrate attention to quality, performance, and observability by ensuring monitoring, actionable alerts, and practical runbooks for owned areas. 
• Establish, influence, and drive adoption of coding standards, data standards, and operational best practices across the data engineering space. 
• Contribute to and help evolve data governance and operating models that improve data quality, consistency, and trust. 
• Advocate for automation and efficiency across the data engineering workflow (CI/CD, testing, repeatable deployments, documentation, lineage). 
• Identify and solve quality problems in others’ code with actionable review feedback, pairing, and driving follow-through to resolution. 
• Maintain a high bar in code reviews and technical design discussions (clarity, correctness, testing, operability, alignment to standards). 
• Balance technical complexity with user experience and consumer needs (reporting applications, BI consumers, ML/AI use cases). 
• Gain alignment from team-level to org-wide on technical strategy and best practices by influencing through clear proposals, prototypes, and coaching. 
• Effectively partner with project stakeholders and leadership to clarify goals, manage tradeoffs, and drive outcomes. 
• Serve as a formal technical lead on projects; delegate work effectively by providing context and success criteria, fostering growth and ownership throughout the team. 
• Focus on high-priority projects first; explicitly deprioritize lower-value work and communicate tradeoffs clearly. 
• Actively mentor or coach all team members, providing feedback to grow hard skills (design, SQL/Python quality) and soft skills (communication, influence). 
• Resolve conflict and foster productive discussions; encourage an open and inclusive culture. 
• Drive continuous team improvement by turning learnings into updated standards, patterns, and practices. 
• Demonstrate significant learning outside of primary team responsibilities and apply it to improve the data platform and team effectiveness. 

Education and Experience 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related discipline or equivalent practical experience. 
• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, including ownership of large-scale production data systems and hands-on leadership as a technical lead. 
• Strong expertise in cloud architectures, distributed systems, and automation, especially within AWS-based data platforms. 
• Deep hands-on experience with reporting and analytics data modeling and ELT pipelines. 
• Strong experience with Snowflake, dbt, Python, and SQL with exception-level proficiency. 
• Experience with real-time or event-driven data processing (e.g., Kinesis, EventBridge) and orchestration (e.g., MWAA/Airflow). 
• Experience enabling a broad set of consumers, from reporting applications and BI to ML/AI solutions built on top of curated data products. 
• Proven track record optimizing large-scale data platforms for reliability, performance, and cost. 

Physical requirements 

• Ability to sit for extended periods: The role requires sitting at a desk or workstation for long periods, typically 7-8 hours a day. 
• Use of computer and phone systems: The employee must be able to operate a computer, use phone systems, and type. This includes using multiple software programs and inquiries simultaneously. 

Paylocity is an equal-opportunity employer. Paylocity is committed to the full inclusion of all individuals. We recruit, train, compensate, and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law. At Paylocity, we believe diversity makes us better.

We embrace and encourage our employees’ differences in age, culture, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion or spiritual belief, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our employees unique. We actively cultivate these differences through our employee resource groups (ERGs), employee experiences, perspectives, talents, and approaches to drive innovation in the software and services we provide our customers.

We comply with federal and state disability laws and make reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. To request reasonable accommodation in the job application or interview process, please contact accessibility@paylocity.com. This email address is exclusively designated for such requests, aligning with federal and state disability laws. Please do not send resumes to this email address, as they will be removed.

The pay range for this position is $117,900 - $168,000/yr; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This position is eligible for a restricted stock unit grant based on individual performance in addition to a full range of benefits outlined here  Benefits Link. This information is provided per the relevant state and local pay transparency laws for the location in which this position will be performed. Base pay information is based on market location. Applicants should apply via www.paylocity.com/careers.
 

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