Staff Software Engineer, Data Engineering
Location
San Francisco, CA
Employment type
Full-time
About us
We're building the creative layer for modern communication. Every month, over a billion people make presentations — but the tools they use to make them haven't evolved in decades. We're changing that, using AI to disrupt a massive market.
📈 Millions of people rely on Gamma to create, teach, and persuade, creating more than 1 million gammas every day.
💻 We see Gamma as the next great workplace tool, combining viral B2C love with a massive B2B opportunity. We believe AI can be a true creative partner: one that understands context, clarity, and taste.
💸 We’ve reached a $2.1B valuation, crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue, and have been profitable since 2023.
💙 We're an imaginative, passionate team who takes our work seriously, but not ourselves. Our culture is warm, a little quirky, and fueled by curiosity.
About the role
You'll own Gamma's data infrastructure and architecture as we scale to hundreds of millions of users and petabytes of data. This means defining the technical strategy for our end-to-end event pipeline architecture, designing distributed systems that handle massive scale with reliability, and establishing the foundation for how data flows through Gamma. You'll solve the hardest data engineering challenges we face while setting the technical direction for data infrastructure across the company.
As a Staff Data Engineer, you'll balance hands-on engineering with technical leadership. You'll architect solutions for orders of magnitude growth, mentor engineers across the organization, and drive strategic decisions about our data stack. You'll work closely with analytics, product, and engineering leadership to enable data-driven decision making at scale while building systems that serve millions of users and inform critical business decisions.
Our team has a strong in-office culture and works in person 4–5 days per week in San Francisco. We love working together to stay creative and connected, with flexibility to work from home when focus matters most.
What you'll do
- Own and evolve our end-to-end event pipeline architecture, from Kafka ingestion through Snowflake analytics, setting technical direction for data infrastructure
- Design and architect distributed data systems that scale to orders of magnitude more data volume while maintaining world-class query performance
- Lead initiatives to build and optimize CDC (change data capture) pipelines and streaming data transformations at massive scale
- Establish best practices for data quality, pipeline reliability, and system observability across the organization
- Drive strategic technical decisions about data modeling, infrastructure architecture, and technology choices
- Mentor engineers and elevate data engineering practices across analytics, product, and engineering teams
What you'll bring
- 10+ years of experience as a data engineer or software engineer working on data infrastructure with deep expertise in distributed systems
- Expert-level knowledge of event streaming platforms, especially Apache Kafka (producers, consumers, Kafka Connect, stream processing)
- Extensive hands-on experience with Snowflake, including performance optimization, cost management, and data modeling at massive scale
- Strong understanding of relational databases (particularly Postgres) and experience with CDC patterns and replication strategies in distributed environments
- Proven track record architecting and leading major data infrastructure initiatives that handled orders of magnitude growth
- Experience establishing data engineering best practices and driving technical strategy across organizations
- Strong communication skills and experience influencing technical direction across engineering, analytics, and leadership
- Experience with dbt (data build tool) for transformation workflows
- Knowledge of data governance, privacy compliance (GDPR, CCPA), and security best practices
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code using Terraform
- Background working with high-growth SaaS products at massive scale
Compensation range:
$230K - $310K, plus competitive equity.
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including but not limited to experience and expertise in the requirements listed above.
If you're interested in this role but you don't meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply anyway! We're always excited about meeting great people.
Engineering at Gamma
Our tech stack:
We're building on a full Typescript stack centered around some of the most modern and popular technologies.
AI
- We use our own custom, open-source AI prompting framework, AIJSX. We have a lot of custom tools built in-house, but also new ones like Vercel AI SDK.
- Full end-to-end observability using Datadog, Braintrust, and our own data warehouse
Our tiny team operates at massive scale:
1M+
AI generated presentations daily
70M
users around the world
6M+
AI images generated daily
1 trillion
LLM tokens processed per month
Life at Gamma
🤝 You’ll fit right in if…
- You get energy from small teams doing big things.
- You love when design, code, and storytelling overlap.
- You default to action, even when the answer isn’t clear yet.
- You value details, but know when to ship and move on.
- You bring both the spreadsheets and the sparkle, equal parts workhorse and unicorn.
- You believe AI should amplify creativity, not replace it.
- You know kindness and intensity are not opposites.
- You like working with people who care deeply: about their craft, their teammates, and the users on the other side of the screen.
💙 Who we are
Gamma is full of imaginative, passionate people who take their work seriously but not themselves. The culture is warm, a little quirky, and fueled by curiosity. It’s the kind of place where you’ll debate a pixel on Monday, laugh over someone’s keyboard setup on Tuesday, and ship something remarkable by Friday.
We care about craft, move with intention, and don’t mind getting a little scrappy. It’s fast, creative, and occasionally chaotic — but that’s what makes it interesting.
💬 Here’s a bit about what it’s like to work here, from people on the inside:
We asked the team what makes Gamma, Gamma. Here were some of their answers:
- "quirky, inspiring, fun, a little wild in the best way"
- "You can have an idea and just run with it."
- "Everyone’s talented and humble — the mix keeps you sharp."
- "We ship cool stuff, learn a ton, and laugh a lot doing it."
Meet the team
We're a team of dreamers and doers building in beautiful San Francisco 🌉
We're kabbadi enthusiasts, pickleballers, dog herders, woodworkers, keyboard nerds, potters, and more — and we can't wait to meet you!
