Senior Airbyte Specialist (Contract)

The magic of small teams can exist at any organization.

We started Span to address a pattern we'd all lived: as teams expand, context is buried under layers of meetings, tools, people and process. Things begin to stall in the "outer loops" like prioritization, allocation, collaboration, and management—areas where mistakes and inefficiencies are arguably more costly.

We are creating a new type of tool that delivers coherent and useful software engineering context for humans and agents alike, a tool that we believe will enable ownership, autonomy, and superhuman impact inside of an engineering organization.

We’re building a future where:

• Engineering leaders can understand their most precious resource - team time - so that they’re able to invest intentionally, root out hidden costs of toil, and unlock the true potential of their team.

• Everyone inside the organization can have an intuitive grasp of what’s happening so they’re empowered to make better decisions, operate confidently and deliver predictably.

• The hours tied up in tagging, status reporting and coordination meetings are automated away so that people spend less time on busywork and more time on the real work.

We are seeking a senior-level Airbyte expert to act as our lead advisor and specialist for all things data movement. In this role, you will partner with our platform engineering team to solve our most complex Airbyte challenges.

Your primary focus will be on developing and troubleshooting connectors, advising on best practices for scaling and reliability, and empowering our internal team with your deep expertise. You will not be operating the infrastructure directly; instead, your guidance will be critical in ensuring our data integration capabilities are robust, efficient, and scalable.

• Expert Connector Development: Design, build, and maintain high-quality custom Airbyte connectors, strategically selecting the best tool for the job (Python CDK, Low-Code CDK, Connector Builder).

• Advanced Troubleshooting: Serve as the ultimate escalation point for complex connector and sync failures. Collaborate with our team to diagnose issues spanning source/destination systems, database configurations (especially CDC), and Airbyte internals.

• Architectural Advisory: Provide expert recommendations to our platform team on scaling Airbyte on Kubernetes. Advise on best practices for resource management, concurrency tuning, and workload isolation to ensure platform stability and efficiency.

• Observability Strategy: Design and recommend robust monitoring and alerting strategies using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, or similar tools, enabling our team to proactively manage platform health and SLOs.

• Mentorship & Best Practices: Create and champion best practices for connector development and platform usage. Mentor internal engineers, elevating their Airbyte expertise.

Must-Haves:

• Demonstrable, deep expertise with Airbyte, especially in a large-scale environment.

• Proven, expert-level experience developing, maintaining, and troubleshooting custom connectors using the Airbyte Python CDK.

• Expert-level theoretical and practical knowledge of Kubernetes as it pertains to Airbyte (Helm, resource management, scheduling) in order to provide credible architectural advice.

• Strong proficiency in Python.

• Deep understanding of troubleshooting complex data integration issues, particularly with databases and Change Data Capture (CDC) mechanisms (e.g., PostgreSQL WAL).

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a proven ability to advise and mentor technical teams effectively.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Familiarity with the Airbyte Low-Code CDK or the no-code Connector Builder.

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).

• Hands-on experience designing observability strategies for a distributed system using OpenTelemetry.

• Experience contributing to open-source projects.

Backed by dozens of founders and CTOs we admire from places like Slack, Notion, Rippling, Fivetran and Coda, CPOs from places like Adobe and Square, as well as funds like Alt, BoxGroup, Bling, Craft, and SV Angel who dare to dream with us.