Senior Data Engineer

About the role

TRM Labs is on a mission to BUILD A SAFER WORLD through AI-powered intelligence solutions that enable public and private sector agencies to investigate and disrupt crime. The role is situated within the Data Platform Serving team, which owns the StarRocks-backed serving layer that sits underneath government cloud investigations. This is a critical, high-availability environment where you will work alongside the current domain owner to ensure the platform remains fast, reliable, and compliant as it scales for leading agencies and businesses worldwide. You will directly support the mission by making the world safer and more secure through technically demanding work in a regulated government cloud deployment.

What you'll do

• Drive performance tuning on the StarRocks serving layer using AI-assisted query profiling (Claude, internal tooling) to find and fix slow query patterns before they become customer-facing incidents, directly supporting the mandate to BUILD A SAFER WORLD.
• Build and harden data pipelines feeding government cloud investigations, using AI code review workflows to ship reliable changes faster in a high-compliance environment where mistakes are costly and operational risk is strictly managed.
• Reduce single-point-of-failure risk on GovCloud data infrastructure by becoming the second engineer who can independently operate and troubleshoot the serving layer, cutting incident response time when the primary owner is unavailable and improving overall system resilience.
• Use AI-assisted debugging and log analysis to triage production issues in a regulated environment, turning multi-hour investigations into rapid root-cause fixes that maintain compliance and availability.
• Own operational runbooks and on-call responsibilities for the StarRocks-backed serving layer, ensuring high availability, reliability, and adherence to government cloud requirements.
• Collaborate with the Data Platform organization to define schema changes, data retention policies, and query patterns that support both commercial and public sector workloads without compromising compliance.
• Partner with Forward Deployed Engineering and Product teams to translate investigation requirements into performant data models and serving-layer optimizations that keep the government cloud environment at parity with the commercial platform.
• Implement observability and alerting for data pipeline health and query performance, using evidence-based analysis to prioritize fixes and meet strict compliance and operational standards.
• Contribute to architecture decisions that balance scalability, compliance, and speed, recognizing that errors in this regulated environment can have serious consequences.
• Mentor junior engineers on best practices for distributed OLAP systems, incident response, and AI-assisted development workflows to strengthen the team's depth and reliability.

Requirements

• U.S. citizenship is required for this role due to government cloud data access requirements, ensuring alignment with national security and compliance obligations.
• Hands-on experience operating distributed OLAP or serving-layer systems (StarRocks, Trino, ClickHouse, or similar), including query tuning and performance optimization at scale in production environments.
• Demonstrated experience owning data pipeline reliability and leading incident response in production, with a track record of maintaining uptime in critical data platforms.
• Comfort using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, or similar) to accelerate debugging, code review, and documentation, leveraging these technologies to operate effectively in a high-compliance setting.
• Independent ownership mindset with the ability to ramp on unfamiliar production infrastructure using AI-assisted research and code exploration, taking initiative to solve complex problems with minimal oversight.
• Willingness to take on-call responsibility with minimal oversight in a high-availability government cloud environment, including participation in team working hours and limited travel for compliance or customer engagements.
• Strong understanding of compliance and operational risk in regulated data environments, including familiarity with audit, retention, and access control considerations.
• Ability to communicate clearly and make evidence-based technical decisions in a distributed team that operates across Slack and async docs with a bias toward direct, factual discussion.

Nice to have

• Experience working in a government cloud environment with strict audit and retention requirements, including prior work meeting compliance deadlines under pressure.
• Familiarity with audit log retention and compliance-driven configuration changes, including the use of AI-assisted tools to implement and verify policy updates.

Team Operating Rhythms and Collaboration

The Data Platform Serving team operates with constant communication across Slack and async documentation, ensuring that decisions are made close to the data by engineers who run the systems. You will participate in weekly team syncs to review open incidents, in-flight infrastructure work, and upcoming compliance milestones, as well as sprint-based planning cycles with clear ownership. Retro sessions follow any production incident to capture learnings and adjust runbooks, reinforcing the team's commitment to reliability and continuous improvement.

Learn about TRM Speed

• A production database migration broke search-attribute registration across two environments right before a critical audit deadline. The on-call engineer traced the root cause, shipped a fix, and had both environments passing smoke tests again within the same day.
• With a compliance deadline days away, the team needed off-cluster backups for the government cloud database with no prior tooling in place. An engineer designed and shipped the full backup and restore pipeline - three stacked PRs - in under two weeks.
• Audit log retention needed to jump to meet a new compliance floor with no advance notice. The engineer used AI-assisted config generation to update retention policies across the environment and verify compliance the same week.

About TRM Labs and Life at TRM

TRM Labs is building tools that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime, with work that sits at the intersection of AI, national security, and fighting crime. The problems are complex, the stakes are real, and the environment evolves quickly. The pace and intensity of the work reflect the importance of the mission. As part of this role, you will contribute to a safer world by ensuring that TRM's government cloud environment remains a trusted, high-performance platform for investigators worldwide.