Staff Data Engineer - Vehicle Telemetry and Data… at ALSO · Palo Alto

About ALSO. We’re ALSO, an electric mobility company originally conceived as a part of Rivian. We’re a passionate team of builders, dreamers, doers and innovators, focused on creating entirely new (not to mention, innovative and delightful) vertically integrated, small EVs designed to meet the global mobility challenges of today and tomorrow. Our mission is to inspire everyone to ride ALSO—replacing many local car, truck and SUV miles with ones on vehicles that are more affordable, more enjoyable and 10-50x more efficient. We are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to own the telemetry data platform for vehicle-generated data. This role is for ingestion, infrastructure, and large-scale data processing — ensuring raw telemetry flows are reliable, scalable, cost-efficient, and analytics-ready. You will operate at the intersection of data engineering and backend systems, designing pipelines that ingest, process, and serve high-volume, high-velocity vehicle telemetry to downstream analytics, ML, and visualization systems. This is a platform ownership role, not a dashboarding or reporting position What you will do: - Design and own large-scale ingestion pipelines for vehicle telemetry data (events, metrics, time-series) with high throughput and low latency - Architect and operate end-to-end ETL/ELT systems from raw ingestion to warehouse/lake consumption - Define schema evolution, versioning, and backward-compatibility strategies for telemetry data at scale - Build safe and repeatable backfill, replay, and reprocessing mechanisms for historical and real-time data - Design data storage and lifecycle strategies across hot, warm, and cold paths to balance cost and performance - Develop fault-tolerant, observable, and debuggable pipelines with strong SLAs around freshness, completeness, and latency - Implement backend services and APIs for telemetry ingestion, configuration management, metadata, and orchestration - Apply strong software engineering practices including object-oriented design, automated testing, CI/CD, and code reviews - Establish automated data quality checks, anomaly detection, alerting, lineage, and auditability across the platform - Provide technical leadership by setting platform direction, reviewing designs, mentoring engineers, and influencing product and engineering roadmaps What you will bring: - 10+ years of experience in data engineering and/or backend platform engineering operating production systems at scale - Deep hands-on experience with large-scale telemetry or IoT data, including high-throughput and low-latency ingestion - Strong expertise in AWS data and infrastructure services (S3, Kinesis/MSK, Glue, EMR, Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge) - Proven experience owning end-to-end ETL/ELT infrastructure using Spark/PySpark (batch and streaming) on Databricks or EMR - Solid understanding of streaming architectures using Kafka or equivalent systems and time-series–optimized storage patterns - Strong backend engineering skills using Python and/or Java/Scala, including API design (REST/gRPC) and distributed systems fundamentals - Experience with data platform architectures such as data lakes and lakehouses, schema registries, and metadata systems - Hands-on experience with orchestration frameworks (Airflow, MWAA, Dagster) and production-grade observability (logging, metrics, tracing) - Infrastructure-as-code expertise using CloudFormation, Terraform, or CDK to manage scalable and reliable systems - A track record of building highly reliable, fault-tolerant systems with clear ownership, strong SLAs, and operational excellence NICE TO HAVE - Experience with vehicle, sensor, or IoT data - Streaming-first architectures - Experience supporting real-time inference pipelines - Prior Staff or Principal-level ownership of data platforms Perks & Benefits • Robust health coverage — excellent health, dental, and vision insurance covered up to 100% by ALSO, with FSA & HSA options • One Medical membership and dedicated insurance advocates • Rich fertility and family-building benefits with Progyny • Flexible time off • 401(k) match The salary for this position ranges from $190,000 - $220,000 per year, depending on experience and qualifications. Why ALSO. We’re passionate about helping the world find a better way to get there—wherever it is you’re headed. We’re located in the heart of Silicon Valley and have brought together a world-class team from some of the biggest brands in the technology, automotive, cycling, outdoor recreation and retail spaces. Together we’re working hands-on to imagine, design and build an entirely new solution to a global set of transportation challenges.