Senior Staff Data Engineer

About SonderMind

At SonderMind, we believe everyone deserves one personalized, connected, and effective mental health destination to take care of their mental health and well-being at any stage of life. SonderMind care encompasses everything from therapy and medication management to meditation and mindfulness exercises. Our clinicians leverage our digital tools and research to deliver increasingly high-quality care and to develop thriving practices. Combining technology and human connection, SonderMind drives better outcomes through our comprehensive approach.

Additionally, we expect all team members to effectively leverage modern AI technologies as part of their everyday workflow, and to continuously adapt as new tools emerge. Familiarity with job-relevant AI platforms such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub Copilot or other industry-standard AI productivity tools is expected and considered essential for success at this company.

About The Role

We are hiring a Senior Staff Data Engineer to play a senior technical leadership role on SonderMind’s Data Platform team. This role focuses on designing, building, and evolving the data systems that support analytics, experimentation, machine learning, and clinical outcomes across the business.

As a Senior Staff Data Engineer you will operate with a high degree of ownership and autonomy. You will be responsible not only for delivering reliable data infrastructure, but also for shaping technical direction, establishing best practices, and enabling other teams to move faster with high-quality, trusted data; while operating within the constraints of a regulated healthcare environment.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain core data pipelines and infrastructure that power analytics, experimentation, machine learning and AI fine tuning and agentic use cases across product, clinical, and operations teams.
• Own data architecture decisions related to ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving layers, with a focus on scalability, reliability, cost efficiency, and maintainability.
• Establish and enforce data quality, observability, and reliability standards, including SLAs, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices for critical datasets.
• Partner closely with analytics, data science, and product engineering teams to understand data needs and translate them into well-designed, reusable data models and pipelines.
• Lead technical initiatives and drive best practices across the data engineering team, including code quality, testing, documentation, and data contracts.
• Ensure data systems meet privacy, security, and compliance requirements, with a strong understanding of handling sensitive mental health and healthcare data.
• Mentor and support other data engineers, providing technical guidance, design feedback, and helping raise the overall engineering bar.
• Support other responsibilities and ad-hoc projects as needed based on evolving business and platform needs.

What does success look like?

• First 3–6 Months
• Develop a strong understanding of SonderMind’s data landscape, key business use cases, and regulatory constraints.
• Take ownership of critical pipelines or platform components and begin making meaningful improvements to reliability and clarity.
• Build trust with analytics, data science, and engineering partners through consistent delivery and thoughtful technical decisions.
• Continued Success in the Role
• Data pipelines are reliable, observable, and well understood, with fewer surprises and faster issue resolution.
• Teams across the company are able to move faster because data is accessible, well modeled, and trusted.
• Technical decisions scale well over time and reduce long-term maintenance and operational burden.
• You influence platform direction beyond your own code by raising standards and helping others make better technical choices.

How Performance Is Measured

• Reliability and quality of core data systems, including uptime, freshness, and accuracy.
• Impact on team velocity and downstream consumers, including analytics, ML, AI, and product.
• Technical leadership and influence across the data organization.
• Alignment with SonderMind’s career competencies, including ownership, collaboration, and thoughtful problem-solving.

Who You Are

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or backend engineering roles.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and at least one general-purpose programming language (Python strongly preferred).
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining production data pipelines at scale.
• Experience working with modern data platforms, including cloud data warehouses, orchestration tools, and transformation frameworks.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, pipeline reliability, and system design trade-offs.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally and translate business needs into effective technical solutions.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred (Not Required):

• Experience in healthcare, mental health, or other regulated environments.
• Familiarity with streaming or event-driven data systems.
• Experience supporting machine learning or experimentation workflows.
• Exposure to data governance, privacy, or compliance frameworks.

Our Benefits

The anticipated salary range for this role is $180,000 - $200,000. Final compensation will be determined based on a variety of factors, including relevant experience, skills, education, and past performance.

Our benefits include:

• A generous PTO policy, with a minimum of three weeks off per year.
• A holiday schedule that follows standard U.S. holidays.
• Free therapy coverage benefits to ensure employees have access to the care they need (must be enrolled in a qualifying medical plan to participate).
• Competitive Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage, with plans to meet every need — including HSA (with $1,100 company contribution) and FSA options.
• Employer-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, life & AD&D, plus coverage of the salary difference for up to seven weeks of short-term disability leave (after the required waiting period).
• Eight weeks of paid Parental Leave; if the parent also qualifies for STD, this benefit is in addition, allowing for 8–16 weeks of paid leave.
• 401(k) retirement plan with 100% match on up to 4% of base salary, immediately vested.
• Join teammates from across the country at our annual company gathering.
• Company shutdown between Christmas and New Year’s.
• Supplemental life insurance, pet insurance, commuter benefits, and more.

Application Deadline

This position will be an ongoing recruitment process and will be open until filled.

Equal Opportunity

SonderMind does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices based on race, color, creed, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, religion, veteran and military status, marital status, registered domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition (including genetic information or characteristics), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.