Senior Data Engineer

At Doist, our mission is to empower people with simple yet powerful tools.

We're a multidisciplinary, fully-remote, team that’s passionate about creating products, like Todoist and Twist, that improve people’s lives. We thrive on innovating new solutions to old productivity challenges and we seek to rethink how productivity tools are made.

Our Core Values

They are few, but they are mighty. From creating processes to decision-making and recruiting, we build our four core values into nearly every single thing we do.

• Ambition. You aspire to put a dent in the universe. You set high standards for yourself and those around you. You solve issues that have a high impact on our customers and our company.
• Mastery. You care deeply about the quality of your work. You’re continuously learning and pushing yourself to the limits of your ability. As a champion of your craft, you are also a champion of your well-being – you work intensely, then disconnect completely.
• Independence. Others can trust that you’ll deliver on time. You keep your word and trust your teammates to do the same. You are proactive, take ownership, and remain accountable with little or no direction.
• Communication. Your communication is clear, concise, and engaging. You keep others in the loop and never go radio silent. You speak respectfully and foster warm relationships through your interactions. You’re culturally and socially aware and can appropriately navigate social situations.

We invite you to visit our blog to learn more about us, our values, and how we work.

Your Team & Role

We're looking for a generalist Data Engineer to join the Platform Engineering team at Doist. You'll be the primary technical owner of our data infrastructure — building any pipelines, tools, and systems that turn raw data into actionable insights for the whole company.

Our products (Todoist and Twist) serve millions of users, but the data infrastructure is rudimentary — it grew organically and at times relies on spreadsheets. We're at an inflection point: formalizing our data strategy, rethinking data architecture from the ground up, performing gap analysis to drive a roadmap, reviewing data modeling and data flows, qualifying data consumption needs, prioritizing use cases, identifying the need for data pipelines, and enabling teams to answer their own questions (with some AI assistance) without needing an engineer. You'll be central to that transformation.

The Platform team owns the data infrastructure, other teams own several parts of reporting, Product owns experiments — you'll work at the intersection of all three, very central to the value creation flywheel.

You will:

• Build and maintain data pipelines from OLTP production systems (MySQL, ClickHouse) to a data lakehouse/warehouse.
• Design and implement CDC (Change Data Capture) solutions — our current pipeline is stale and needs replacement
• Own data quality — set up monitoring and alerting to the relevant teams responsible for the systems collecting the data, and ensuring freshness across our data and analytics infrastructure
• Enable self-serve analytics — help engineers and non-engineers answer their own questions without needing an engineer
• Document and democratize — help maintain and refine tooling for data catalogs, metric definitions, and make data discoverable
• Platform Engineering — contribute to other Platform Engineering challenges, helping accelerate other teams while upkeeping reliability and confidence

This is a 70% data / 30% platform role. You'll spend most of your time on data engineering, but you'll also contribute to the broader Platform mission.

Why This Role Exists

Doist has grown to serve millions of users, but our data capabilities haven't scaled accordingly:

• Knowledge is concentrated — too few people know how our rudimentary data systems work
• Pipelines are unreliable — our MySQL CDC pipeline has been unreliable and needs to be thought through from scratch
• Self-serve is blocked — non-engineers need engineers to answer basic questions about their own data
• No governance for analytical systems — our retention and privacy policies focus on OLTP, and need to apply to the new data systems you'll be responsible for before data access becomes democratized

This role addresses all four. You'll bring expertise, rebuild reliability, enable self-serve, and help establish governance.

About the Team

You'll join the Platform team, a small group (3 people) focused on the infrastructure and systems that power Doist. We own databases, cloud infrastructure, some developer tooling, and — with this hire — data systems.

You'll report to Alex Rodrigues (Head of Platform) and work closely with:

• Finance — who owns company metrics and dashboards
• Product — who owns feature metrics and experiments
• Backend — who owns in-product data collection

The team values:

• Async-first communication
• Ownership and autonomy
• Shipping iteratively
• Building for the long term

Requirements

It's important to us that the person we hire will thrive in this role. Here are some core things we believe will set you up for success:

Technical Skills

• Systems programming — proficiency in Go or Rust for building performant, reliable data tooling. We value engineers who understand memory management, concurrency, and can write software that runs efficiently at scale.
• Linux systems knowledge — you can identify I/O bottlenecks, interpret iostat/vmstat/perf output, understand how disk and network affect pipeline throughput, and debug performance issues at the OS level
• Strong SQL — you'll write a lot of it, optimize it, and debug queries against messy historical data
• Low-level data formats — hands-on experience with Parquet, Iceberg tables, columnar storage tradeoffs, and lakehouse architectures
• Data warehouse/lakehouse experience — BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or similar
• Cloud platforms — AWS required (S3, Glue, Athena, RDS), GCP familiarity a plus
• Pipeline tooling — experience with CDC (Debezium, DMS), orchestration (e.g. Airflow), or streaming (Kafka, Kinesis)
• Data modeling — dimensional modeling, schema design, understanding of OLTP vs OLAP tradeoffs, and how to evolve schemas without breaking downstream consumers
• Integrations – you can build entire end-to-end systems that onboard data from 3rd parties using a mix of their APIs and webhook handlers

Mindset

• You translate business questions into technical requirements — stakeholders will come to you with vague questions; you'll turn them into concrete data problems
• You're comfortable with messy reality — historical data is imperfect, schemas evolved without documentation, and you can find creative and pragmatic approaches to make some sense of it anyway
• You care about data quality as much as data availability — a pipeline that delivers wrong data is worse than no pipeline
• You build simple, cost-efficient solutions — you'd rather ship something straightforward that works than something complex that might work
• You can work independently — in a remote, async-first environment, you drive your own work
• You're comfortable with ambiguity — you'll often need to clarify requirements, not just execute them
• You document as you go — your work should be understandable by others
• You leverage AI tools effectively — you use LLMs and code assistants to accelerate your work, while applying judgment to validate outputs and catch mistakes

Nice to Have

• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Analytics engineering (dbt)
• Python scripting for glue code and automation
• Data observability tools (Monte Carlo, Great Expectations, custom solutions)
• Experience with data governance and privacy controls

Apply soonest, as these roles don’t come along often and we move fast.

Our Process

1. Submit your complete application by March 23, 14:00 UTC. Attach a resume (or manually entered experience) and thoughtful responses to all the application questions. No cover letter needed!
2. Application screening. We read every application to understand your motivation, skills, and experience. Once your application has been reviewed, you'll receive a response regarding the status of your application.
3. Salary transparency & Value-alignment interview with shortlisted candidates. If you’re shortlisted, we’ll calculate and share the salary range of your location up front. Then you’ll schedule a call to meet with Gonçalo, our CTO.
4. Paid Task Assignment. This will be your opportunity to showcase your role-specific skills, how you think and work.
5. Role-alignment panel interview with Alex, Head of Platform Engineering.
6. Culture-contribution interview with Luciano, one of our amazing Platform Engineers.
7. Reference & Background checks.
8. Offer to the successful hire.

Benefits

Our perks and benefits are designed to provide the freedom and support you need to grow personally and professionally. Here’s what that looks like:

The basics

• We work remotely and mostly async from anywhere. If you see a specific location being advertised, feel free to apply any way, this is usually due to restrictions on a few job boards.
• Design your own schedule. Work during the time of day that’s best for you. Doisters are encouraged to work 8-hour days and no more than 40 hours/week.
• Competitive pay. Our formula-based salaries are calculated based on industry-benchmarked skills and geographical location – no stressful negotiation required.

Expand your professional skills

• Continue your education. You’ll have a recurring budget to spend on attending conferences, taking courses, and purchasing books.
• Collaborate in person at retreats. Our team- and company-wide retreats are unforgettable. The connections that we make in person inspire us throughout the year.

Craft your ideal work environment

• Cozy up at a coworking space. Find a coworking space that’s right for you and Doist will provide a monthly stipend towards this cost.
• Subscribe to apps and services. You’ll have a monthly budget to spend on services that help you do your job: home internet, work apps, music subscription, etc.
• Purchase the hardware you need. Every Doister has access to a recurring budget to spend on work-related equipment.

Focus on your well-being

• Recharge with generous time off. Doisters get 8 weeks (40 days) of vacation per year to use as they wish on vacations and national holidays.
• Spend time with your new baby. New parents receive 5 weeks of paid parental leave in addition to 13 weeks of paid pregnancy-related medical leave.
• Invest in your health and wellness. Take care of yourself with a monthly budget for things like a gym membership, healthy snacks, massages, health insurance, etc.

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We occasionally receive reports about hiring scams related to our roles. Please be aware that our team only communicates from emails with an "@doist.com" domain and that we will not ask you to apply in any way other than via our application at doist.com/careers. If you are in doubt, please reach out at careers@doist.com to confirm.

All information collected through this application is stored in Workable, Doist’s Applicant Tracking System, where it will be used for recruitment purposes only. For more information on how we handle candidate data at Doist, we invite you to review our recruitment privacy notice. For questions, please contact us at careers@doist.com.