Senior Data Engineer

About Us

Volley is the leading developer of AI-powered games for Amazon Alexa, Samsung, LG, Roku, Fire TV, and mobile devices. Our games attract millions of users every month. Popular Volley games include Song Quiz, Jeopardy!, CoComelon: Sing and Play with JJ, and The Price Is Right.

We believe voice interfaces will become the main way people access entertainment in their living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and cars. We’re building a bundled subscription product similar to Netflix or Spotify for the emerging category of “AI-powered games.”

Volley was founded by Max Child and James Wilsterman in 2016 and went through Y-Combinator in 2018, landing a spot on the 2022 YC Top Companies List. We’re a quickly-growing team that truly enjoys working together, headquartered in downtown San Francisco in the historic Phelan Building.

Role Summary

Volley is seeking our first Data Engineer to build the foundation for production-grade data infrastructure and unlock the next phase of our growth. You'll own end-to-end data pipelines for marketing attribution, design scalable orchestration patterns, and establish the reliability standards that turn growth data into a dependable system. This is a high-impact opportunity to create durable infrastructure from the ground up and materially improve marketing efficiency.

What You'll Do at Volley

• Build and own end-to-end data pipelines, including attribution and third-party enriched data sources (ingestion → orchestration → warehouse → consumption).

• Establish production-grade reliability standards: monitoring, alerting, SLAs, observability, runbooks, and incident response.

• Design scalable patterns for handling late/out-of-order data, backfills, historical consistency, and data quality.

• Implement environment separation (dev/stage/prod), CI/CD for pipelines, and data contracts/validation frameworks.

• Collaborate with Data, Growth, and Engineering teams to define data requirements and enable confident decision-making.

• Lay the groundwork for unified attribution and incrementality frameworks that drive marketing spend optimization.

• Turn today's brittle, ad-hoc pipelines into production-grade systems that increase velocity and reduce fire drills.

We're Excited About You Because You Have

• 5+ years of data engineering experience with a proven track record of building reliable production pipelines.

• Deep expertise with orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, or Dagster) including scheduling, retries, alerting, and SLAs.

• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with experience building ELT/ETL pipelines at scale

• Hands-on experience with modern data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift).

• Deploying and operating pipelines in cloud (IAM, networking basics, secrets, CI/CD).

• Track record of improving data reliability: handling schema drift, late data, backfills, and operational incidents.

• Experience making data production-ready with proper monitoring, documentation, and ownership.

Bonus Points

• Experience with marketing attribution or growth analytics pipelines.

• Background in analytics engineering (dbt, SQLMesh, Dataform) or strong understanding of data consumer needs.

• Gaming or entertainment industry experience.

• Early-stage startup experience building with limited resources.

• Familiarity with observability tools.

Our Stack

• Snowflake

• Tableau, Amplitude

• dbt, Airflow, Dagster

• Segment, Fivetran

• Languages: Python, SQL

The Hiring Process

• Stage 1 (Preliminary Video Call): with a member of our Recruitment team

• Stage 2 (Hiring Manager + Technical Call): A call with the team's Hiring Manager followed by a technical session with one of our Analytics Leads.

• Stage 3 (Onsite Interview): with various partners and team members

• Stage 4 (Founder Chat) with our Founders

As an AI company, we’re a huge believer in the value of AI tools. That being said, the interview process is intended as a conversation - we want to get to know you and your experience. Please refrain from using AI tools during all Volley interviews unless otherwise specified.

What’s in it for You

• Your medical, dental, and vision insurance is 100% covered by Volley, for yourself and all dependents and we match 401k!

• We offer a flexible, hybrid work-from-home and in-office work model.

• We offer unlimited paid time off (enforced 2-week minimum), 16 paid holidays, 40 hours of bereavement leave, and unlimited sick days.

• Our generous parental leave policy includes 24 weeks at 100% pay for birthing parents and 12 weeks at 100% pay for non-birthing parents.

• We offer visa support for eligible candidates, making relocating for the job smoother and more streamlined.

• A full breakdown of our benefits is here!

For Pay Transparency: The final offer amount may depend on experience, education, skills, and location. Base pay is one part of the total package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work.

Weekend is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Weekend will ensure that persons are provided reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process. If any reasonable accommodation is needed, please reach out to your hiring contact.