{"id":16120,"url":"https://alion.io/job/virtuous-lead-data-platform-engineer","title":"Lead Data Platform Engineer","company":{"id":4908,"name":"Virtuous","domain":"virtuousindia.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/virtuous","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.6,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":55,"computed_at":"2026-09-28T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Phoenix, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":114000,"max_usd":224000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":246},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"dbt","optional":false},{"name":"ETL/ELT","optional":false},{"name":"IAM","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Looker","optional":true},{"name":"Tableau","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-02-12T21:10:39Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-02-12","last_verified_at":"2026-09-28T20:45:28Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":228,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":227},"description":"Position Summary\nVirtuous is evolving its data platform into an AI-ready foundation that powers trusted decision-making and self-service analytics across the company.\nWe’re hiring a Lead Data Platform Engineer to design, build, and own the systems that power our data ecosystem. This role is ideal for a highly motivated self-starter who is comfortable with ambiguity and thrives at the intersection of systems design, business semantics, and AI enablement.\nThis is not a traditional data engineering role focused on building one-off pipelines, dashboards, or ad hoc reports. Success in this role comes from designing and building durable platform capabilities - security models, access patterns, cost controls, and shared data foundations - that enable teams (and AI systems) to safely and confidently use data at scale.\nYou’ll work closely with the Director of Data Operations as well as our Finance, Product, Engineering and Security Teams to ensure our data platform is accurate, governable, and ready to support AI-enabled workflows across the company.\nWhat You'll Build & Own\nData Platform & AI-Enablement\nOwn the evolution of Virtuous’s data platform, primarily on Snowflake and dbt, as a secure, scalable, and AI-ready system.\n\nDesign data models, metadata, and access patterns that support natural-language querying and AI-assisted analysis.\n\nPartner with Data Operations and Teams across the company to ensure data structures are accurate, reusable, and aligned with business definitions.\n\nPrepare data foundations that allow AI tools to deliver consistent, timely, and trustworthy answers.\n\nEnsure AI systems access data exclusively through governed service accounts and role-scoped permissions, with query activity auditable and restricted according to enterprise data classification and access standards.\n\nAccess, Trust & Governance by Design\nArchitect and implement role-based access controls within Snowflake and related data systems (including row- and column-level security), ensuring enforcement aligns with enterprise IAM standards, approved access policies, and centralized identity governance processes.\n\nIn partnership with Security Operations and IT, translate approved enterprise access and compliance policies into enforceable platform-level controls, and maintain technical configurations to ensure ongoing alignment with those standards.\n\nEnsure all platform-level access controls integrate with the enterprise identity provider (SSO, SCIM, role lifecycle management), and support automated provisioning, deprovisioning, and periodic access certification processes.\n\nBuild governance patterns that are enforced by design - not by manual process.\n\nSupport periodic access reviews and control validation processes in coordination with Security and Compliance teams, ensuring appropriate separation of duties between policy definition, approval, and technical implementation.\n\nPlatform Leverage & Standards\nBuild and maintain CI/CD pipelines, testing strategies, and deployment patterns for dbt and Snowflake.\n\nDesign deployment, testing, and validation patterns that make accuracy the default.\n\nEstablish platform standards, templates, and best practices that enable others to move faster without sacrificing quality or security.\n\nIncrease the amount of trusted work the organization can do without increasing Data Ops involvement.\n\nReduce ad hoc work by building reusable systems and guardrails.\n\nAct as a technical leader and thought partner across data-related initiatives.\n\nReliability, Cost & Performance\nOwn Snowflake warehouse strategy, resource governance, and cost optimization.\n\nContinuously improve performance, scalability, and reliability across the data platform.\n\nIdentify and eliminate inefficiencies that increase cost, risk, or operational overhead.\n\nCollaborate with IT and Cloud Engineering to ensure Snowflake networking, storage integrations, and data movement patterns align with enterprise cloud security baselines, network segmentation standards, and infrastructure governance policies.\n\nWhat Success Looks Like\nTeams reliably self-serve data and insights without increasing DataOps workload or risk.\n\nAI-powered tools consistently answer business questions accurately, using governed data, with access enforced by role and context.\n\nData access, governance, and correctness are enforced by platform design rather than manual review or process.\n\nPlatform improvements materially reduce cost, operational risk, or time-to-insight.\n\nShared, trusted models replace bespoke datasets and one-off definitions.\n\nAt least one company-critical initiative (e.g., AI enablement, cost optimization, access expansion) succeeds specifically because of systems you designed and built.\n\nWho This Role is For\nCare about leverage, durability, and outcomes - not just shipping artifacts.\n\nThink deeply about how AI and automation change the role of data platforms.\n\nAre highly self-directed and motivated, and take pride in ownership.\n\nThrive in ambiguity and are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.\n\nAre motivated by leverage, correctness, and long-term impact - not ticket volume or titles.\n\nReadily navigate cross-functional tradeoffs to build shared data foundations that serve the whole company, not individual teams.\n\nYou Must Have\n7+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or related infrastructure roles, with ownership of production systems.\n\nDeep expertise in Snowflake, especially:\nRoles and RBAC\n\nRow-level and column-level security\n\nWarehouse design and cost optimization\n\nPerformance tuning and governance\n\nStrong experience using dbt to build and maintain shared data models, including macro development, testing strategies, source freshness, group model security implementation, and production deployment patterns..\n\nAdvanced SQL skills and experience designing reliable ELT/ETL pipelines.\n\nProven systems-thinking mindset, with the ability to reason about tradeoffs across correctness, access, cost, and speed.\n\nClear communicator who can explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical partners.\n\nNice to Have\ndbt certification strongly preferred\n\nExperience enabling AI/ML or natural-language data access.\n\nFamiliarity with data observability, lineage, or metadata tooling.\n\nExperience designing platforms for self-service analytics.\n\nExposure to BI tools such as Sigma, Looker, or Tableau.\n\nExperience working in lean, fast-growing organizations where leverage matters more than headcount.\n\nAbout Us\nVirtuous software is powering the world’s leading nonprofits and inspiring a new generation of generosity.\nAt Virtuous, we believe generosity has the power to transform the world - and so we are on a mission to create $10B in net new generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their donors.\nOur talented team is hungry, humble, and committed to delivering best-in-class software solutions, customer success interactions, and sales experiences to the nonprofit community.\nOur values are more than just a poster on the wall. Instead, our mission and values are precisely why candidates choose Virtuous. Our core values are:\nBuild Better: We build audacious ideas to accelerate philanthropy and dismantle the status quo.\n\nDisplay Radical Generosity: We are generous with our time & talent as we serve our team and the nonprofit community.\n\nStay Humble & Enjoy the Journey: We take our work seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously.\n\nVirtuous should act as a career accelerator for everyone on our team. Team members should look back at their time at Virtuous as one of the most productive and stretching seasons in their professional lives. This means that working at Virtuous isn't for everybody. It is for the select few who are ready to do hard things and build something truly great.\nIf this sounds like you, we’d love for you to apply!\nWhat We Offer\nMarket competitive pay leveraging Carta data\n\nEmployee recognition through Bonusly (birthdays, anniversaries, achievements, etc.)\n\n401(k) retirement plan with company matching- 50% match up to 6% of compensation after 90 days\n\nWe value our employee’s work-life balance and encourage taking advantage of Unlimited PTO\n\nSupportive time off including paid volunteer days and company holidays\n\nEmployer-contributed healthcare benefits, encompassing medical, dental, and vision coverage, with plans available for dependents and choices for Health Savings Accounts (HSA) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA).\n\n12 weeks primary parent leave, 4 weeks secondary parent leave - full pay (adoption as well)\n\nWe pride ourselves on Community and host exciting company outings and events.\n\nWe’ve recently noticed an increase in recruitment scams where individuals are impersonating recruiters to obtain personal or financial information through fraudulent interviews and job offers.\nPlease note that all legitimate communication from Virtuous will only come from the @ virtuous.org domain. If you receive a message from other domains, even if they look similar (e.g., virtuouscareers.org or virtuousjobs.com), they are not legitimate and we recommend disregarding it immediately.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9171,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Retirement plans","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Information Technology"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-02-12T21:10:39Z"}],"liveness":{"score":10,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.344,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":227,"expected_fill_days":55,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-09-28T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/virtuous-lead-data-platform-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/virtuous-lead-data-platform-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-29T03:28:51Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":3205,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":1795,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-30T00:00:00Z"}}}