Regrid - bringing the actionable unit of geography to everyone. Lead Data Engineer Remote · Full time

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About Us

Regrid is building something unique and significant: a long term, independent service dedicated to understanding land parcels as the intersection of property and geography on Planet Earth. 

We unify fragmented property records and geographic insights into a seamless, nationwide, and globally expanding parcel dataset. Delivered through APIs, applications, files, cloud platforms, and compatible services,  we eliminate the struggle of sourcing, cleaning, and maintaining incomplete parcel data. By bridging property and geography at the parcel level, we provide the foundational context to uncover the where and why behind every location decision.

Founded in Detroit, Michigan in 2009, we spent our early years helping Detroiters use parcel data to combat challenges of widespread vacancy, blight, and foreclosure. We passionately believe in our mission: "We are the parcel people, bringing the actionable unit of geography to everyone." Our mission shows up for us everywhere, from individuals to the largest enterprise organizations, and through our Data With Purpose program for nonprofits and educators. 

The Role

At Regrid, data is our product. Our platform powers one of the world's most comprehensive parcel and property intelligence datasets, and we're building the infrastructure that allows it to scale.

As our Lead Data Engineer, you will serve as both technical architect and team lead—guiding the evolution of our data platform while managing and mentoring a team of data engineers. This is a true player/coach role: you'll remain hands-on with architecture, code, and technical decision-making while creating the environment, processes, and culture that enable your team of three to excel.

You will help design and operate the scalable pipelines that power our parcel, address, enrichment, and geospatial products. Along the way, you'll develop engineering talent, drive execution across multiple initiatives, and establish the technical foundations that support the next generation of geographic intelligence.

If you're a seasoned data engineering leader who enjoys solving complex data challenges, mentoring high-performing teams, and building systems that operate at massive scale, we'd love to talk.

Key Responsibilities

Team Management

• Mentor and support a small team through technical leadership, coaching, and regular feedback.
• Help coordinate project priorities and team execution while remaining an active contributor to delivery.
• Establish engineering standards and promote operational excellence.
• Participate in hiring, onboarding, and career development efforts.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous learning.

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Help shape the long-term technical direction of the data platform.
• Design and evolve scalable, cloud-native architectures supporting parcel, address, enrichment, and operational datasets.
• Guide architectural decisions around storage, processing, orchestration, governance, and observability.
• Conduct architectural reviews and establish best practices for reliability, maintainability, and scalability.
• Partner closely with other departments and leadership teams to align technical investments with business goals.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend strategic improvements to the platform.

Cloud Data Infrastructure & Pipeline Development

• Build and operate AWS-native data platforms leveraging services such as S3, Glue, Athena, EMR, Lambda, Fargate, and related technologies.
• Design, build, and maintain medallion-style data pipelines processing large-scale geospatial and property datasets.
• Establish and monitor service-level objectives for data quality, freshness, reliability, and performance.
• Contribute hands-on code and technical solutions alongside the engineering team.
• Establish best practices around security, access controls, environment management, deployment automation, and disaster recovery.
• Improve observability through logging, monitoring, alerting, and operational metrics.

Innovation & Advanced Data Solutions

• Partner with the CTO to evaluate and implement emerging technologies.
• Work closely with leadership on machine learning-powered enrichment initiatives.
• Research new tools, frameworks, and methodologies that improve scalability, performance, and developer productivity.
• Drive continuous improvement across data engineering processes and platform capabilities.

What You Bring

Core Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in data engineering or related technical disciplines.
• A deep curiosity and vision for how data infrastructure can unlock new levels of geographic intelligence and product innovation.
• Strong experience building distributed data pipelines and cloud-native data platforms.
• Deep proficiency with Python and modern software engineering practices.
• Experience with AWS-based data infrastructure.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner effectively across engineering, product, support, and executive leadership teams.

Experience That Will Help You Succeed

• Experience working with large and complex datasets: Regrid maintains a spatial dataset of 160M parcel polygons, 180M address points, 180M building footprints, and more. Experience with geospatial datasets, including points, polygons, spatial indexing, and spatial joins at scale, is highly valued.
• Comfort working across file-based, table-based, and relational data systems.
• Familiarity with modern data technologies such as GeoParquet, Apache Iceberg, Apache Sedona, GeoPandas, DuckDB, Arrow, Spark, and PostGIS.
• Experience implementing Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or CloudFormation.
• Exposure to machine learning pipelines, data enrichment workflows, or production ML infrastructure is a plus.

How We Work

A couple things you should know about us:

First, you may have noticed that we are pretty obsessed with parcels and parcel data (the lines that define property boundaries and all that can be matched to them). You don’t have to be on day one to work here, but fair warning our focus is singular, and our mission is to bring this fundamental unit of geographic organization to everyone.

Second, we have a collection of rules to work by that we call our “Plats”. Here are a few that should resonate for you if this role is going to be a fit:

1. No “what” without “why”.

Tasks and directives without narrative context and connection to our larger story are not inspiring. Explaining the “why” helps everyone see the purpose of our actions so we can bring more energy and creativity to them.

2. Collaboration is undefeated. We're all on the same team and we show it. Every individual, every department, every project: we are all Regrid working together and giving each other energy. Asking questions, sharing ideas and information, and helping each other succeed is how we win as a team.

3. People remember how you made them feel.

It’s just true. Within our team and with our customers, emotions linger longer than specific words or actions. The smallest interaction can leave a lasting impression of trust, care, or disrespect. Even when a conversation isn’t easy, focusing on positive emotional impact builds enduring relationships.

4. Execution is worshipped.

Ideas are the number one best thing going. But ideas come to us, we don’t really create an idea, we just catch them, like fish. Then, the whole thing is translating that idea to some medium. That’s the execution. Without it, the fish just swims away.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary Range: $160,000 - $190,000
• 100% Paid Health Insurance for Employee and 50% Paid Health Insurance for eligible dependents
• HSA, Healthcare and Dependent Care FSAs with Company Contribution
• 401K Retirement Plan with Company Match
• Unlimited PTO
• Paid Parental Leave
• WFH, Learning and Development and Wellness Stipends 
• Flexible Remote Culture