Senior Staff Engineer - Data Foundations

About Foursquare 

Foursquare is the leading independent location technology and data cloud platform, dedicated to building meaningful bridges between digital spaces and physical places. Our proprietary technology unlocks the most accurate, trustworthy location data in the world, empowering businesses to answer key questions, uncover hidden insights, improve customer experiences, and achieve better business outcomes. A pioneer of the geo-location space, Foursquare’s location tech stack is being utilized by our mobile apps CityGuide and Swarm, as well as the world’s largest enterprises and most recognizable brands, like Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, Spotify, Uber, Airbnb and others.

Foursquare’s flexible building blocks include technology to maximize marketing impact and drive incremental real-world engagement (Attribution, Audience, Proximity, SDK); data to deeply understand points of interest and real-world behavior patterns (Places and Visits), and tools to conduct advanced analysis, data enrichment, unification and visualization (Studio).

About the Position

Foursquare is looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to join our team! While we would prefer candidates based in or around our office hubs in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, or San Francisco, we're also open to considering remote applicants for this role.

About the team:

The successful candidate will join the Data Foundations team. The Data Foundations layer is the backbone on top of which all the new Foursquare products are built. It comprises various teams focused on our primitive datasets such as our Places & Movements datasets and the Knowledge Graph that connects all these datasets together. Our Places dataset combines billions of individual pieces of information into a comprehensive dataset of hundreds of millions of points of interest around the world, from restaurants to bars, stores to parks, hotels to colleges. Foursquare’s unique movement understanding models help extract high quality signals about user’s movements across Places from error prone GPS data. In addition to powering our branded products, our Knowledge Graph is powering the location features of tens of thousands developers, including Apple, Microsoft, Uber and many more.

About the role:

The Senior Staff Engineer will work on our Knowledge Graph infrastructure. An ideal candidate in this role is proficient in operating big data systems including data lakes and data warehouses, building end-to-end data pipelines with technologies such as Spark & Airflow, and has familiarity with analytical tools and frameworks like SQL, DBT. The successful candidate is expected to contribute in all stages of design, implementation, orchestration, and deployment pipelines and tools that handle vast amounts of data in a distributed environment. In addition, they will be able to communicate decisions, updates, and trade-offs to external parties, including the product and go-to-market teams, and play a vital role in decision making.

In this role, you’ll 

• Build, deploy, and orchestrate big data processing pipelines, that directly enhance our Places products and client deliveries
• Work with Data Scientists to bring their machine learning models into production
• Architect or incorporate new tools and technologies to optimize development, monitoring, and quality assurance of our pipelines
• Drive schema management best practices across the org
• Act as a force multiplier, supporting and mentoring junior engineers, conducting code reviews, and coordinating cross-team efforts
• Partner with our vendors to understand and implement best practices for specific softwares
• Safeguarding the accuracy and uniformity of our data patterns, showcasing a meticulous approach to data design
• Shape broad architecture decisions, and participate in planning and Product decisions

What you’ll need 

• 10+ years industry experience building and supporting large-scale distributed systems
• Comfortable working towards a multi-year vision with incremental deliverables
• Experience with open table formats, data lakes and data warehouse
• Experience with analytical tools such as SQL and/or Python
• Familiarity with various ELT frameworks such as FiveTran and DBT 
• Motivated by delivering customer value and impact
• Strong foundation in algorithms and data structures and their real-world use cases
• Experience driving company initiatives towards customer satisfaction
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related majors, or equivalent experience
• Your own unique talents! If you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications outlined above, we encourage and welcome you to still apply!