Data Engineer - Oakland

Company Overview · Promise modernizes how government agencies and utilities support people in financial difficulty. We build technology that makes it simple for residents to receive benefits, engage with assistance programs, set up flexible payment plans, and stay on track—while ...

Job description

Company Overview

Promise modernizes how government agencies and utilities support people in financial difficulty. We build technology that makes it simple for residents to receive benefits, engage with assistance programs, set up flexible payment plans, and stay on track—while helping agencies increase efficiency, recover revenue, and deliver services with dignity. Our mission is to transform public systems so they work better for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.

Our team includes experts from companies like Palantir, Google, Stripe , and esteemed government leaders. We work hard and believe deeply in what we do. We're looking for excellent people to build innovative, resilient technology.

Backed by over $50 million in funding from top investors – such as Reid Hoffman, Howard Schultz, Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, 8VC, The General Partnership, First Round Capital, Kapor Capital, XYZ Ventures, and Bronze Investments – Promise has been recognized as one of Fast Company's "World's Most Innovative Companies of 2022," "Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2024," and Y Combinator's #1 GovTech startup.

About the Role

At Promise we rely on data for every decision we make – from product and engineering to operations, finance, and everything in between.

As our newest Data Engineer, you'll build and scale the systems that power data-driven decisions across the company. You'll work directly with a variety of stakeholders in the business – such as product, engineering, customer success, and finance – to design reliable and understandable data architectures, ship resilient pipelines, and create the foundational data products that drive our strategy and product.

On Any Given Day, You Will:

• Own data architecture end-to-end. Every new project we build is slightly different – how do we capture, model, and serve critical business data so it's both flexible and straightforward.

• Automate operational workflows. Partner with business systems and platform teams to eliminate manual data handoffs and ensure every teammate has access to the data they need, where they need it.

• Enforce data quality at scale. Build tests, monitoring, and reconciliation systems that make datasets observable and anomalies actionable.

• Design and maintain scalable data models, decision tools, and analytics infrastructure to empower self-serve analytics and derive insight.

• Enable insights and experimentation. Support analytics, ML, and product engineering teams by exposing high-quality, comprehensible data through semantic layers, APIs, and real-time query systems.

What Will Help You Succeed

• The data team at Promise is a team of builders. We identify problems both internal and external, then implement end-to-end data solutions.

• Have 5+ years of experience as a data or software engineer building data warehouses, pipelines, and distributed data systems.

• Can draw on a variety of modeling techniques to drive sustainable data solutions.

• Have deep hands-on expertise with a modern data stack, from ingestion to transformation (dbt, etc.), orchestration (Airflow, etc.), observability, and BI (Looker, Metabase, tc.).

• Have operated cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift, including schema design, security and permissioning, and data governance.

• Are comfortable writing production-grade code in Python or SQL languages, and integrating with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code workflows.

• Enjoy partnering across disciplines—engineering, product, analytics—to translate messy business requirements into elegant data systems.

• Thrive as a self-starter in a fast-moving environment, owning both the technical design and the operational outcomes of your work.

Who Thrives at Promise

You'll love it here if:

• You are energized by big, complex challenges and the opportunity to solve them.

• You want your work to have a real, measurable impact on people's lives.

• You take ownership and run toward problems, not away from them.

• You value clear, candid, and constructive communication.

Promise is not for you if:

• You prefer hierarchy and rigid structures. We operate with freedom and responsibility.

• You are uncomfortable with change. We move fast, adapt often, and expect agility.

• You want a typical corporate culture. We are mission-driven, ambitious, and direct.

• You believe efficiency means "doing less." We believe efficiency means doing better.

How We Support Our People

• 100% paid health coverage

• Generous PTO and sick leave

• Lunch, snacks, and coffee provided

• Company retreats

• Opportunities to travel and see the impact of your work

• Hybrid work: we deeply value in-person collaboration and are in-office at least 3 days a week, but are flexible on working from home

Promise is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against any applicant or employee because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information, age, or military or veteran status. Additionally, the Company complies with applicable state and local laws governing non-discrimination in employment in every jurisdiction in which it operates. Promise is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We also provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities, pregnant individuals, and those with sincerely held religious beliefs, in accordance with applicable laws. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email

Promise engages in US government contracts and restricts hiring to US persons, which includes US citizens and permanent residents (e.g., Green Card holders). Additionally, candidates must reside in the US.