Staff Data Engineer at CookUnity in New York City, NY

About CookUnity: Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul. Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world. If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting. About the Team: Our Data Team is a highly dynamic and innovative group that excels in solving complex business challenges and propelling the growth of an enterprise through analytical expertise. We provide crucial insights that empower individuals across the company to make better decisions, ultimately increasing efficiency. If you have a passion for shaping the future of an organization with your analytical skills, this role offers an exciting opportunity to fulfill your aspirations. The Role: This is a rare opportunity to work at a rapid growth scale-up company and build on an entirely new system to set the engineering foundation and principles across the org. You will partner closely with the engineering team to translate data needs into scalable, production-ready solutions. You will design & build net new data pipelines and systems that form the future base of our B2C data engineering stack, and set in place best practices and patterns for the entire CookUnity data engineering org to adopt. We’re looking for someone excited about the prospect of taking an existing product that’s growing rapidly and helping to rebuild key components of our system. This will help set CookUnity up to scale gracefully for our next years of rapid growth, reduce overall system complexity, enable greater product experimentation, and enable product teams to build incredible features faster. Responsibilities: Design and build net new resilient batch and real-time data pipelines that power critical products and drive rapid business growth. Design and build data pipelines facilitating the migration from existing disparate data models and data sources, into new data models and databases in production. Champion data reliability and performance by implementing proactive monitoring and quality-first engineering practices. Optimize data models to support fast, efficient decision-making across high-impact product and business use cases. Partner closely with product, engineering, and data science teams to quickly translate evolving business needs into scalable, production-ready data solutions. Shape the future of data engineering at scale, helping define the long-term roadmap and setting best practices as we grow. Coach and level up teammates, fostering a culture of learning, ownership, and continuous improvement. Demonstrate strong self-direction and thrive in environments with high ambiguity, making sound decisions even when clear solutions are not readily apparent. Minimum Requirements: 7+ years of experience in backend software engineering. Proficient in Java, Scala, or Python, with deep expertise in data processing tech and in writing complex SQL queries. Proven track record of driving innovation within highly technical, distributed teams. You have driven complex projects to completion and are motivated by solving high-impact problems and building for the best user UX. Proven track record in designing, building, and operating robust distributed data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Spark, Flink, Kafka), and handling large data sets. Demonstrable experience of building, productionalizing, and optimizing real-time and batch data pipelines. Preferred requirements: Experience designing data architectures to power a variety of use cases, including enabling experimentation Be opinionated on engineering best practices and help contribute to our strong engineering culture. Experience with cloud-native technologies (Kubernetes, containers, etc). Past experience working in a rapid growth company or an early stage startup environment. A passion for food! Benefits: 🩺  Health Insurance coverage 🌅 401k Plan 📈 We grow, you grow: Stock Options Plan granted on Day 1 ⛱ Unlimited PTO 🗓️ 5- year Sabbatical: After 5 years with CookUnity, you get a 4-week paid sabbatical 🐣 Paid Family leave 🕯 Compassionate Leave: 3-5 days each time the need arises 🥘 A generous amount of CookUnity credits to enjoy our amazing meals, added to your account, monthly 🤖 AI-forward workplace: enterprise access to ChatGPT and Claude to help you work smarter and grow faster. 🧘🏽‍♀️ Wellness perks: access to fitness subsidies to build a healthy lifestyle 👩🏾‍🏫 Personalized Spanish coach 🚀 Awesome opportunity to join a company that is looking to change how we eat and how chefs work! Learn More About CookUnity We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we’re looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale. We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we’d love to connect! Compensation All final pay rates will be determined by candidates experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data. Pay Range for this position $180,000—$200,000 USD If you’re interested in this role, please submit your application, and if we think you might be a fit, we'll get in touch with you. Thank you for your time! CookUnity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or physical or mental disability. A quick note for all candidates We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams across the industry, and we want to make sure you (and your data) stay safe while applying to CookUnity. We also want you to know that we take this seriously — sometimes, as part of our process, we may ask for a brief “proof of humanity” to confirm that we’re connecting with a real person, not an impersonator. Here are a few tips to help you protect yourself and know what to expect from us: Apply only through our official channels. All open roles are listed on our official careers page: careers.cookunity.com Our recruiters are real people — and easy to verify. You can always find them on LinkedIn with verified profiles. If you’re unsure, feel free to reach out to us on our official LinkedIn Company Page. We only communicate through official CookUnity channels. That means emails ending in @cookunity.com and interviews held through official company platforms (Google Meet or Zoom) — never WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS. We’ll never ask for payment or personal financial details. If anyone does, please don’t share any information and let us know right away. If something ever feels off or you’re unsure about a message, we’d much rather you double-check with us. You can always contact us directly through any of our social media channels. We appreciate your interest in joining CookUnity — and we care about keeping your experience (and safety) as genuine as possible.