Data Operations Engineer

At Podium, our mission is to arm every local business with a complete platform and outcome-driven AI employees that convert leads into real, paying customers. Every day, millions of workers use our AI lead conversion and communication platform to help them get more leads and make more money.

Our work and focus on helping local businesses thrive has been recognized across the industry, including Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, the Inc. 5000, and Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies.

At Podium, we believe in fostering a culture that thrives on hiring and developing exceptional talent. Our operating principles serve as a compass, guiding daily behavior and decision-making, and ensure we hire people who will thrive at Podium. If you resonate with our operating principles and are energized by our mission, Podium will be a great place for you!

The Role

At Podium, our Data Ops Engineers are the ultimate protectors of data flow, ensuring everything runs smoothly like a well-oiled machine. Think of this role as a mix of a data wizard and a system superhero, keeping our data systems fast, reliable, and ready to handle anything. You’ll be joining a team of passionate engineers who geek out over large-scale data systems and are always on the lookout for new ways to innovate. We take pride in owning tools like Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Redis, and collaborate closely with PostgreSQL engineers and the SRE team to keep things running flawlessly.

But that’s not all – you’ll also play a crucial role in supporting Podium’s efforts to build cutting-edge AI agents for local businesses. Your work will directly impact how these businesses interact with customers, using AI to transform their operations and drive growth.

What you will work on:

• Owning Elasticsearch, and jumping in on Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, and whatever cool data technologies come our way.
• Supporting our engineering teams with all things Elasticsearch – from index design to performance optimization.
• Rolling out new features and tackling upgrades like a pro.
• Keeping a close eye on data health with metrics, observability, and planning for the future.
• Squeezing out every drop of performance through tuning and capacity planning (we’ve got fun tools like Rally for testing).
• Automating everything with Terraform and Ansible – because who doesn’t love Infrastructure-as-Code?
• Sharing the love by evangelizing best practices with the broader engineering teams.
• Rotating on-call – because, let’s face it, data never sleeps!
• Contributing to our AI agent projects by ensuring the underlying data systems are rock-solid and scalable.

What we’re looking for:

• You’ve been around the block with data stores (3+ years of experience).
• Elasticsearch is your jam – you’ve got 2+ years of deep experience, especially on the search side (not just log ingestion). You know index design, configuration, performance tuning, and all the bells and whistles.
• You’ve handled Elasticsearch at scale, supporting search-heavy applications.
• Comfort with the open-source version of Elasticsearch – no vendor support, no problem!
• Cloud-savvy (AWS preferred), and experience automating infrastructure with tools like Terraform and Ansible.
• You thrive in fast-paced, startup environments, and you’re ready to move fast, but smart.

Bonus points if you have:

• Hands-on experience with a variety of data technologies.
• Experience building multi-regional Elasticsearch setups.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI is a plus).
• Worked with Kafka Streams, KSQL, and Kafka Connect.
• Dabbled in Elixir, or have experience with ES or PG vector search.

BENEFITS

• Open and transparent culture
• Life insurance, long and short-term disability coverage
• Paid maternity and paternity leave
• Fertility Benefits
• Generous vacation time, plus three 4-day summer holiday weekends
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision benefits
• 401k Plan with competitive company matching
• Bi-annual swag drops with cool Podium gear and apparel
• A stellar HQ (Utah) gym with local professional coaches and classes offered
• Onsite HQ (Utah) child care center, subsidized for employees
• Additional benefits for fully remote employees

Podium is an equal opportunity employer. Podium provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, genetic information, marital status or veteran status.