Staff Data Engineer, Tech Lead

About the role

At Mudflap, we're modernizing the $1 trillion trucking industry, the backbone of the U.S. economy. By helping over 100,000 underserved small businesses save over $1.5 billion on fuel, Mudflap has quickly grown into a profitable fintech platform that processes billions in annual payment volume.

We are building the data foundation that powers smarter, faster decisions across the business. As a Staff Data Engineer, Tech Lead, you’ll play a mission-critical role in designing, scaling, and governing our modern, cloud-based data platform — and in leading the team and the projects that deliver it. Your expertise in data ingestion, data architecture, schema design, and governance will help shape how data flows across our systems and is leveraged by teams company-wide.

This is a unique opportunity to set standards, drive technical direction, and ensure the quality, consistency, and scalability of the data platform that hundreds of thousands of SMB trucking companies rely on - and love - to run their businesses every day. You’ll lead projects end to end, working directly with product leaders and business leaders across Operations, Finance, and Risk, etc. to turn their needs into clear technical requirements. You’ll partner with engineering leadership on how the team plans and operates, work alongside staff engineering leadership to drive alignment across the organization, and set our direction on how AI and agentic workflows reshape data engineering. It’s an ideal role for someone looking to grow their leadership scope while staying deeply technical.

Work Location: This role is based in Palo Alto and involves a hybrid work approach, balancing in-office collaboration with the ability to work remotely.

To support our team, we offer:

- Commuter benefits to ease your travel

- Lunches and snacks to keep you fueled

- A collaborative, high-growth environment where you’ll work closely with talented teammates across the company

Expectations (In this role, you will):

- Act as the overall technical leader for the data engineering, owning architecture direction, setting standards, and making the design decisions that unblock the team.

- Lead high-impact, cross-functional initiatives end to end — scoping the problem, sequencing the work, and driving it to delivery. Partner with manager on team and project management processes, from sprint planning to team processes.

- Drive organization-wide technical alignment, representing data in staff engineering leadership forums and partnering with engineering leaders across the company on shared initiatives.

- Serve as our thought leader on AI and agentic workflows in data engineering, and deepen the team’s AI transformation.

- Architect and scale ingestion frameworks to bring diverse data sources (internal systems, third-party APIs, streaming events) into our platform in a reliable, high-throughput way.

- Own and evolve the architecture for machine learning deployment in partnership with our data science teams, building the infrastructure and patterns that move models from prototypes to reliable, monitored production serving.