Founding Staff Engineer

Rockstar is recruiting for a super-senior full-stack engineer to join a dynamic, early-stage team building an integration-heavy data platform. This is a foundational, hands-on role where you will own how data is ingested, normalized, validated, and served from messy real-world systems, with the path to grow into a hands-on technical lead.

What you’ll do (hands-on, end-to-end)

- Build full-stack product features end-to-end: frontend UI, backend APIs/services, data pipelines, deployment and observability.

- Own the integration strategy and connector architecture across multiple vendors and authentication patterns (OAuth/API tokens/read-only portal access/automated exports).

- Design and implement data ingestion and processing primitives: retries, idempotency, backfills, schema evolution, and anomaly detection.

- Create a flexible canonical data model and mapping layer that can normalize structural + semantic differences across systems (e.g., different definitions of revenue/net sales/business day).

- Build the metrics/semantic layer that powers product experiences and deterministic tool outputs (numbers must be correct and auditable).

- Implement data quality and validation workflows so failures are observable and fixable (quarantine/error surfacing instead of silent wrongness).

- Make sound build vs buy recommendations for integration tooling and infrastructure (unified APIs, managed ETL, warehouses, observability, etc.).

- Work directly with the founder and pilot partners to unblock access issues, validate data, and iterate quickly.

What we’re looking for

- 10+ years building production software; prior Staff/Principal level or equivalent.

- Proven full-stack ownership: you can ship UI + backend + data pipelines without needing separate specialists.

- Strong TypeScript experience (frontend and backend); Python experience is a plus (not required).

- Deep experience with data engineering fundamentals: SQL, modeling, ETL/ELT, event-driven ingestion, reconciliation/validation, and operationalizing pipelines.

- Experience building and maintaining multiple third-party integrations (API design, rate limits, auth, retries, monitoring, vendor quirks).

- Strong systems design judgment: you choose tools/architecture based on constraints and tradeoffs, not familiarity.

- Comfortable operating in ambiguity with real customers and aggressive timelines.

Nice-to-haves (domain + tooling)

- Experience integrating with operational systems such as POS, labor/scheduling, payroll/timekeeping, accounting/ERP, inventory/COGS, purchasing/ordering, or analytics/BI.

- Experience with Postgres and an OLAP/warehouse (ClickHouse/BigQuery/Snowflake/Redshift) and building a metrics layer.

- Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS with strong security primitives (RBAC, row-level security patterns, audit logging).

- Experience building internal admin tools (integration status, data freshness, backfill tooling, customer support tooling).

Location Preference:

While this role is open to candidates located within the United States, preference will be given to candidates based in Charlotte, NC, and Atlanta, GA.

Compensation

Competitive cash + meaningful equity (structured for a founding hire). The team is intentionally optimizing for fewer, higher-caliber engineers rather than a lead + juniors model.