Lead Data Engineer

Why this role / Why now

Vori is building the operating system for grocery. Data is at the core: item catalogs, invoices, movements, pricing, promotions, loyalty, and payments all flow through our platform.

We have Forward Deployed Engineers with strong data engineering backgrounds who build integrations and pipelines to onboard customers fast. What we need now is a Lead Data Engineer to own the ETL strategy and data platform end-to-end—setting standards, scaling our orchestration and reliability, and making data a durable competitive advantage.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll architect and build, but you’ll also set direction, create the playbooks, and level up the team around correctness, observability, and speed.

What you’ll do

• Lead the design and evolution of our data platform and ETL/ELT

• Own our orchestration layer: asset design, partitioning strategies, sensors/schedules, backfills/replays, retries, and operational best practices.

• Own pipelines that ingest data from real customer systems (CSV/EDI/API/SFTP, PDFs/OCR).

• Own data checks and monitoring (freshness, duplicates, drift, broken joins).

• Define core data models and metric definitions with Product/Engineering/Ops.

• Improve performance and cost in the warehouse.

• Set engineering standards and mentor the engineers doing data work.

• Help hire and grow the data engineering function over time.

What we’re looking for

Must-haves

• Expertise in data engineering / analytics engineering / data platform roles (or equivalent depth).

• Proven experience designing and scaling data platforms and ETL/ELT systems in production.

• Experience with unstructured ingestion (OCR pipelines, document parsing)

• Excellent SQL and strong fundamentals in data modeling (facts/dims, grains, SCD patterns, avoiding double counts).

• Real operational experience: idempotency, backfills, schema evolution, observability, and incident response for data.

• Startup mindset: you can move fast, prioritize ruthlessly, and build leverage with limited resources.

Analytical “sharp edges” we want

• Strong analytical mind with comfort in probability and statistics (sampling, anomaly detection, false positives/negatives).

• You reason clearly about uncertainty and tradeoffs, and you can explain them simply.

Nice-to-haves

• CDC/streaming experience, event-driven architectures.

• Experience building semantic layers / metrics governance.

• GCP + BigQuery (or equivalent) experience.

How you’ll work with the team

You’ll partner closely with:

• Forward Deployed Engineers who build customer integrations and ingestion

• Operations and onboarding teams who live the messy reality

• Product + Core Engineering teams who build platform capabilities and features

You’ll be the person who makes data “boringly reliable” while still shipping fast.

Expectations (Vori pace)

• You will be stretched and challenged with large scope and fast-paced deadlines. This is not a “keep the lights on” data role—this is building the data foundation for a company transforming a ~$1T industry.

• Vori isn’t a simple 9–5 job. We’re building a Seal Team 6 of individuals who work hard, long, and smart to deliver exceptional results with limited resources. If we win, we transform the most fundamental industry on earth—food. Are you in?

Why Vori

• Mission-driven team building tech that helps local businesses thrive

• Backed by top investors and advisors from Stripe, Uber, Palantir, and Toast

• Real revenue, real growth, and a massive market opportunity

• A chance to shape not just marketing—but the company's future