Senior Data Engineer, Genius

Genius is an American digital media company founded on August 27, 2009, by Tom Lehman, Ilan Zechory, and Mahbod Moghadam. Its website serves as an online music encyclopedia allowing users to provide annotations and…

Location: Los Angeles, CA
Company size: 10–500
Posted: 4mo ago
Via: Greenhouse

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Senior Data Engineer, Genius · Genius

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Job title: Senior Data Engineer, Genius
Job location: Los Angeles, CA | Seattle, WA
Job listing URL: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/genius/jobs/4163486009
Job description: About Genius

Genius is the leading destination for music, lyrics, and the stories behind the songs. At the intersection of music, technology, and culture, Genius connects fans with deeper meaning behind the world’s most influential music. Join an exceptionally talented team of engineers, designers, product leaders, and business builders who are shaping the future of music and media. Genius continues to grow its presence across the U.S., with teams in Los Angeles, New York, and beyond.

Your Role at Genius

Genius is looking for a remote Senior Data Engineer to help build the ultimate music companion. Overseeing millions of pages of lyrics, annotations, and music metadata, your work will power Genius.com, our public API, and our partner integrations, with no shortage of interesting data challenges to solve. We're looking for engineers who thrive in complex backend systems: folks who can build robust data pipelines, optimize query performance at scale, and keep critical services running smoothly.

As a Senior Data Engineer for Genius, you will play a key role in strengthening our data infrastructure, helping us process, transform, and serve the music knowledge that powers everything we do. You will work across our Rails backend, PostgreSQL databases, and Python-based data pipelines to improve data reliability, throughput, and accuracy. Additionally, you'll work to improve the stability, performance, and scalability of Genius' backend services, which is no small feat for a platform serving millions of users daily!

Location Requirement: Candidates must be based in Los Angeles, California, or Seattle, Washington to be considered for this role.

What You’ll Do

Build and maintain data pipelines using Python and Airflow to ingest, transform, and enrich music metadata from internal and external sources

Proactively identify and fix infrastructure bottlenecks to scale backend services to tens of thousands of requests per minute

Architect database query patterns and migrations in PostgreSQL, Clickhouse and BigQuery that scale to large tables with 1B+ rows

Design and implement backend APIs in Ruby on Rails that serve data reliably and performantly to our frontend and partner integrations

Take ownership over the systems you build, proactively identifying and surfacing performance, reliability, and maintainability improvements

During your on-call rotation, be the backstop for backend quality, stability, and performance. Triage incoming issues to find the most urgent problems, and handle emergent incidents to keep services online

Work directly with stakeholders to uncover and address business needs, including product owners, data analysts, and other engineers across the company

What We’re Searching For

Data Pipeline Experience: Hands-on experience building and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines using Python and workflow orchestration tools like Apache Airflow. Candidates should be comfortable with data modeling, scheduling, monitoring, and debugging complex pipeline DAGs.

Database Expertise: Deep proficiency with PostgreSQL and relational databases. Candidates should be able to design database schemas, write complex queries, optimize performance for scale, and manage migrations on large, high-traffic tables.

Backend Framework Proficiency: Strong experience with Ruby on Rails (or a similar "batteries-included" framework). Candidates should be comfortable working with large, established codebases, and have an understanding of architectural patterns necessary to build APIs at scale.

Product Ownership: Brings a product-first mindset, able to drive projects from ideation to launch while focusing on data quality, system reliability, and cross-functional alignment.

Collaboration & Communication: Comfortable working cross-functionally with frontend engineers, data analysts, product, and other teams to ensure clarity, alignment, and smooth execution of projects.

Continuous Learning: Demonstrates a passion for staying current with new technologies, frameworks, and industry best practices—proactively applying improvements to code quality and team workflows.

Experience: At least 4 years of hands-on experience in a backend or data engineering capacity, preferably in a product-driven environment.

Education (Preferred): Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.