Data Engineer

About City Light Capital

This role sits within Machine Labs, an AI start-up that we have incubated within City Light Capital, and reports to the Head of Product. 

City Light is a venture capital firm that invests early in mission-driven companies creating measurable, scalable impact in education, care, and climate. As one of the first firms to define “impact investing” as both a moral and financial mandate, we back founders building solutions that not only perform — but make the world meaningfully better.

Our portfolio includes companies like 2U, ShotSpotter, Bicycle Health, OhmConnect, and Headspace Health. We are a small, high-caliber team that believes better data drives better investing — and that great infrastructure underpins meaningful insight.

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. 

Location: New York Preferred, US-remote considered.

Why this role

• Small, senior team → real ownership and fast iteration
• Clear mandate → reliability, quality, and speed over vanity projects
• Greenfield meets production → extend a working platform, not a blank slate

What you’ll do

• Maintain and scale batch data pipelines in Python + SQL
• Add new sources (APIs, files, warehouses) with robust data contracts
• Implement data validation and quality checks (we prefer Pandera; open to GE/dbt tests)
• Build observability for pipelines (alerts, SLAs/SLOs, lineage, cost visibility, oTel)
• Contribute to modeling in dbt/SQL and help us evolve best practices
• Work with founding team & clients to keep data reliable, documented, and auditable
• Improve CI for data (tests, type checks) and pragmatic infra (Docker/IaC-lite)

Requirements

What you’ll bring

• 1–4+ years as a Data Engineer (startup experience a plus)
• Strong Python and SQL; production code quality (tests, typing, packaging)
• Hands-on with dbt and a modern warehouse (Databricks preferred; Snowflake/others okay)
• Experience with an orchestrator (Dagster preferred; Airflow/Prefect okay) or clear ability to learn fast
• Opinionated about data quality (Pandera/GE/dbt tests) and observability
• Comfortable owning reliability and cost discipline; bias for action

Nice-to-haves

• Spark/Databricks, Polars, MLflow, streaming (Kafka/Kinesis)
• Security & governance basics (secrets, PII handling, access patterns)

30/60/90 (signals of success)

• 30d: Shipping small pipeline fixes, adding tests, and instrumenting alerts
• 60d: Owning 1–2 critical pipelines end-to-end; standardizing validation on a chosen framework
• 90d: Driving a measurable reliability/cost improvement; leading the blueprint for dbt modeling scale-out

Benefits

City Light is an equal opportunity employer. Compensation will be considered on an individual basis, taking into account factors such as experience and expertise. The total compensation range for this position is anticipated to be between $85,000 and $110,000.

We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your well-being, growth, and work-life balance. Highlights include:

• Health & wellness: Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Life & protection: Disability, life insurance
• Leave & flexibility: Generous paid time off, parental leave, flexible scheduling

Interested individuals should submit a cover letter and resume through Workable.