Senior Data Engineer - AI Platform

TRM's government cloud environment gives public sector investigators the same real-time analytical power our commercial customers rely on, and this role keeps that environment fast, reliable, and compliant as it scales. You'll join the Data Platform Serving team, working on the StarRocks-backed serving layer that sits underneath government cloud investigations, alongside the engineer who currently owns this domain solo. This is a chance to build hands-on distributed systems experience in one of the most operationally demanding environments at TRM: a regulated, high-availability government cloud deployment.

The impact you will have:

• You will own performance tuning on the StarRocks serving layer, using AI-assisted query profiling (Claude, internal tooling) to find and fix slow query patterns before they become customer-facing incidents.

• You will build and harden data pipelines feeding government cloud investigations, using AI code review workflows to ship reliable changes faster in a high-compliance environment where mistakes are costly.

• You will reduce single-point-of-failure risk on GovCloud data infrastructure by becoming the second engineer who can independently operate and troubleshoot the serving layer, cutting incident response time when the primary owner is unavailable.

• You will use AI-assisted debugging and log analysis to triage production issues in a regulated environment, turning multi-hour investigations into rapid root-cause fixes.

What we’re looking for:

• U.S. citizenship is required for this role due to government cloud data access requirements.

• Hands-on experience operating distributed OLAP or serving-layer systems (StarRocks, Trino, ClickHouse, or similar), including query tuning and performance optimization at scale.

• Experience owning data pipeline reliability and incident response, and comfort using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, or similar) to accelerate debugging, code review, and documentation.

• Independent ownership mindset: you can pick up an unfamiliar piece of production infrastructure, use AI-assisted research and code exploration to ramp quickly, and take on-call responsibility with minimal oversight.

About the Team:

• The Data Platform Serving team owns the layer that turns TRM's data into fast, reliable answers for the teams and systems built on top of it.

• We're distributed, not distant: the team communicates constantly across Slack and async docs, with a bias toward direct, evidence-based technical discussion.

• Decisions are made close to the data: engineers who operate the systems make the calls on architecture and tradeoffs, with input from the broader Data Platform org.

• We work closely with Forward Deployed Engineering and Product teams to keep the government cloud environment at parity with our commercial platform.

Team Operating Rhythms:

• Weekly team sync to review open incidents, in-flight infrastructure work, and upcoming compliance milestones.

• Async daily updates in Slack on pipeline health, ongoing tickets, and blockers.

• Sprint-based planning cycles with clear ownership assigned per workstream.

• Retro after any production incident to capture learnings and adjust runbooks.

Learn about TRM Speed in this position:

• A production database migration broke search-attribute registration across two environments right before a critical audit deadline. The on-call engineer traced the root cause, shipped a fix, and had both environments passing smoke tests again within the same day.

• With a compliance deadline days away, the team needed off-cluster backups for the government cloud database with zero prior tooling in place. An engineer designed and shipped the full backup and restore pipeline — three stacked PRs — in under two weeks.

• Audit log retention needed to jump to meet a new compliance floor with no advance notice. The engineer used AI-assisted config generation to update retention policies across the environment and verify compliance the same week.

• Recruiter Intro: Qualifications, motivations, and alignment with the role.

• Accelerate repeatable workflows

• Structure and solve problems

• Improve output quality

• Increase speed and leverage

At TRM, you should expect:

• Priorities and targets to change quickly

• Operating with a high degree of ambiguity

• Close collaboration across teams and functions

• Frequent, high-touch communication

• Creative problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking

• Impact-Oriented Trailblazer: We put customers first and move with speed, focus, and adaptability. We treat every plan like an experiment – test, ship, measure, and iterate quickly.