Staff Infra Engineer - Data Platform (Americas)

About the role Build the data platform that powers Shopify. Our Data Platform Tools team owns how Shopify moves, monitors, and uses data at massive scale. You’ll build the internal tooling and platform services that let thousands of engineers and analysts move, monitor, and govern analytical data safely at massive scale. Key Responsibilities Design, build, and operate internal platform services and CLIs that teams use to author, schedule, validate, and ship analytics and operational data modeling changes safely. Improve reliability and operability for data platform systems: SLO-minded monitoring, incident response patterns, safe rollouts, and clear runbooks. Lead large-scale migrations and deprecations (e.g., storage/table formats, orchestration, query engines) with a phased plan, guardrails, and measurable cutover criteria. Drive cost and performance outcomes at scale: identify systemic bottlenecks, right-size workloads, and build guardrails that prevent expensive failure modes. Build developer experience for data producers/consumers: fast feedback loops, golden paths, self-serve workflows, and actionable error messages. Partner across teams to standardize patterns (metadata, access, testing, promotion pipelines) while preserving escape hatches for legitimate exceptions. Qualifications You design maintainable systems, operate them responsibly in production, and reason about correctness, reliability, and performance when data and platform changes affect many teams. Production ownership: ships changes with a plan for rollout/rollback, monitors impact, and follows through after launch. Systems thinking: clear interfaces/contracts, explicit failure modes, and pragmatic tradeoffs between correctness, freshness, cost, and complexity. Data-change discipline: comfortable reasoning about backfills, idempotency, schema evolution, and blast radius when many downstream datasets depend on a platform behavior. Proficiency with at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure). Bonus: hands-on experience with BigQuery, Airflow/Composer, Iceberg/Delta (or similar open table formats), data lake/lakehouse operations, or large-scale platform migrations. At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly — not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. Ready to build the platform behind the platform? Join us. About Shopify Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option. About you Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone. Before you apply, consider if you can: Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter) Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change Bring critical thought and opinion Put AI agents and tools to work on the tasks they're built for, and focus on the work only humans can do Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward Work digital-first for your daily work We may use AI-enabled tools to screen, select, and assess applications. All AI outputs are reviewed and validated by our recruitment team.