Senior Data Engineer
About Neon
Many large companies make billions each year by monetizing Americans’ personal data. At Neon, we’re finally cutting consumers in on the deal. Neon allows our users to make hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars per year by securely selling their anonymized data.
We recently raised over $25 million from investors including Lightspeed, Upper90, and Upfront Ventures.
About the Role
We’re building something exciting at the intersection of consumer data and cutting-edge AI. We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help design and operate the data systems that power our product — with a particular focus on media data (audio, text, and video) and customer-driven business outcomes.
As an early engineering hire, you’ll have a large impact on how our data infrastructure evolves and supports both internal analytics and downstream training/processing workflows.
What You’ll Be Working On
Design, build, and maintain scalable, robust, and automatable data pipelines to support ingestion and processing across structured, unstructured, and media data types (including audio, text, and video).
Partner with product, data science, and business stakeholders to translate business goals and customer needs into engineering requirements — starting with the desired outcome and working backwards into concrete, scalable solutions.
Improve data quality, observability, lineage, and reliability across our modular processing pipeline architecture.
Build and maintain core data infrastructure components (e.g., ingestion APIs, metadata services, observability tooling) that support parallel processing, microservices, and config-driven workflows.
Help evolve our approach to handling time-series and media content at scale, optimizing for throughput, cost efficiency, and real-world performance.
Collaborate across teams to validate production data flows, support onboarding of new datasets, and troubleshoot issues quickly and effectively.
What You Have
4+ years of professional experience in data engineering, building production-grade data systems with Python + SQL.
Strong understanding of data modeling, pipeline observability, and end-to-end data lifecycle management.
Hands-on experience with AWS services (e.g., S3, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, RDS/NoSQL) and building scalable, cloud-native workflows.
Comfort working in a fast-paced, ambiguous, 0-to-1 environment with minimal process.
Excellent communicator who can explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
A strong product mindset and ability to think from first principles — you start with what the business or customer needs and shape the engineering to match.
Nice to Have
Bonus points if you’ve worked with AI models or datasets before, particularly at a voice AI, speech, or related media AI lab.
Experience designing systems that handle large volumes of media data (audio, video) or real-time streams.
Additional experience with OOP languages, particularly JavaScript
Familiarity with modern data observability, metadata tracking, and data governance tools.
What We Offer
Competitive salary and equity package
A chance to own meaningful technical work at an early stage
Opportunity to contribute to data strategy and product vision
A fun, can-do attitude! :)