Staff Data Engineer

ABOUT BESTOW

Life insurance is one of the world's most important products. It's also one of the hardest to build, distribute, and modernize. Bestow exists to change that.

Bestow is a leading vertical technology platform serving some of the largest and most innovative life insurers. Our platform unifies the fragmented, legacy value chain, enabling carriers to launch products in weeks instead of years. Carriers choose us to scale and operate at unprecedented speed, powered by AI and automation.

Bestow isn't selling policies. We're building the infrastructure that helps an entire industry move faster, reach more people, and deliver on its promise.

Backed by leading investors (Goldman Sachs, Hedosophia, NEA, Valar, 8VC) and trusted by major carriers, Bestow is powered by a team that moves with precision, purpose, and heart. If you want to help reimagine a centuries-old industry with lasting impact, join us.

Bestow offers flexible remote/hybrid work, meaningful benefits, equity, and substantial growth opportunities.

Bestow participates in the E-Verify Program.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Bestow Data Engineering team plays a significant role within the organization, working across the entire company to provide scalable data solutions within the platform and toward integrations with external partners. The data engineering team works closely with internal analytics and data science team members in order to improve data architecture, rapidly prototype, and serve data science predictions. In addition, data engineers work closely with stakeholders, members from product, and engineering to design and launch new systems for extracting, transforming and storing data. You’ll be called upon to improve Bestow’s data reliability, efficiency and quality and will be expected to scale your solutions to the cloud environment of a SaaS company, iterate quickly, and make pragmatic choices around what tools and technologies to adopt.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

As a Staff Data Engineer, you will serve as a technical leader and strategic advisor for Bestow's data infrastructure and architecture. You will drive the long-term vision for our data platform while mentoring engineers and influencing technical decisions across the organization.

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for data infrastructure, establishing architectural patterns and standards that scale across the organization

• Lead the design and implementation of complex, multi-system data architectures that support business-critical operations and enable innovation (data ingestion + export and delivery)

• Evaluate and champion adoption of emerging technologies and best practices in data engineering, MLOps, and GenAI

• Establish data governance frameworks, quality standards, and operational excellence practices across all data workloads

• Drive cross-functional initiatives that require coordination between data, product, engineering, and business teams

Architecture & Systems Design

• Architect enterprise-scale data solutions for transferring data from first and third-party applications to and from our data warehouse

• Design and oversee the development of robust, scalable APIs (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) that enable data access for internal teams and external partners

• Lead the evolution of event-driven and API-first data architectures that support real-time data sharing and integration

• Leverage Google Cloud (GCP) tools (Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Vertex AI, App Engine, Cloud Storage, IAM, etc.) and services (Astronomer - Apache Airflow) to architect and bring enterprise data workloads to production

• Design resilient, self-healing data systems with comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and automated remediation - and participating as part of an on-call rotation.

• Lead the evolution of our data platform on Google Cloud (GCP), leveraging advanced services and optimizing for cost, performance, and reliability

• Define patterns for streaming and batch data architectures that serve diverse use cases

• Establish best practices for data contracts, API versioning, CI/CD, documentation, and partner integrations

MLOps & AI Leadership

• Lead MLOps strategy and implementation, establishing patterns for model deployment, monitoring, and governance at scale

• Architect and oversee Generative AI infrastructure, enabling rapid prototyping while ensuring enterprise-grade security, compliance, and cost management

• Partner with Data Science leadership to translate research initiatives into production-ready solutions

• Drive innovation in AI/ML tooling and infrastructure, staying ahead of industry trends

Mentorship & Team Development

• Mentor and guide Data Engineers at all levels, conducting design reviews and providing technical feedback

• Establish engineering standards, documentation practices, and knowledge-sharing processes

• Participate in hiring and onboarding processes, helping to build a world-class data engineering team

• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, experimentation, and continuous improvement

Collaboration & Influence

• Partner with product, engineering, and business leaders to align data strategy with organizational goals

• Making decisions as a team. The things you build will be maintained and improved upon by others; there is a shared responsibility to make defensible design considerations and high collaboration.

• Communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, building alignment and driving informed decision-making

• Represent data engineering in cross-functional planning and architecture forums

• Build strong relationships with external partners and vendors

WHO YOU ARE

• 10+ years working in a data engineering role that supports incoming/outgoing feeds as well as analytics and data science teams

• 5+ years of advanced Airflow and Python experience writing production-grade, efficient, testable, and maintainable code

• 3+ years of experience designing, building, and maintaining production APIs (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) for data access and integration, including API gateway management, rate limiting, authentication/authorization, and versioning strategies

• 3+ years leading ML/MLOps initiatives, including model deployment, monitoring, and governance at scale

• 3+ years of hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) including Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Vertex AI, Cloud Storage, IAM, and other core services.

• Deep expertise with columnar databases (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift) and advanced SQL optimization techniques.

• Demonstrated experience with AI Coding assistants – AI tools are heavily engrained in Bestow culture.

• Proven track record designing an end-to-end data pipeline in cloud frameworks (such as GCP, AWS, Azure) with requirements from multiple stakeholders

• Experience with upstream data coordination through data contracts.

• Experience building CICD pipelines for data processing using tools such as Docker, CircleCI, dbt, git, etc

• Extensive experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi) and GitOps practices

• Expert level knowledge of data orchestration frameworks such as Apache Airflow (or similar) to manage SLOs and processing dependencies

• Experience in building streaming / real-time ingestion pipelines

• Experience with creating alerts and monitoring pipelines which contribute to overall data governance.

• Experience with containerization and container orchestration technologies with cloud architecture and implementation features (single- and multi-tenancy, orchestration, elastic scalability)

• Deep understanding of standard IT security practices such as identity and access management (IAM), data protection, encryption, certificate, and key management.

• Adaptability to learn new technologies and products as the job demands.

• Proven ability to mentor engineers and lead technical initiatives across teams

• Nice to have: Familiarity with building tools that draw upon Generative AI (GenAI) integrations (Enterprise-grade, not simply vibe-coded).

TOTAL REWARDS

At Bestow, we’re proud to be awarded for our team members, innovative products, and culture. Our standard benefits include:

• Competitive salary and equity based on role

• Policies and managers that support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave programs

• 100% paid-premium option for medical, dental, and vision insurance

• Lifestyle stipend to support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing

• Flexible work-from-home policy and open to remote

• Remote and WFH options, as well as a beautiful, state-of-the-art office in Dallas’ Deep Ellum, for those who prefer an office setting

• Employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives

Recent Employer Awards include:

• Best Place for Working Parents 2023 + 2024 + 2025

• Great Place to Work Certified, 2022 + 2023 + 2024 + 2025

• Built In Best Places to Work, 2022 + 2023 + 2025

• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Texas 2022 + 2023

• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Financial Services and Insurance 2022 + 2023 + 2024

We value diversity at Bestow. The company will hire, recruit, and promote regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, pregnancy or maternity, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. We understand the importance of creating a safe and comfortable work environment and encourage individualism and authenticity in every team member.

Thanks for considering a job at Bestow!