Staff Data Engineer - AI Platform

The posting, as TRM Labs wrote it

BUILD A SAFER WORLD.

TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. TRM's platforms enable investigators to trace illicit activity, build cases, and construct operating pictures of threat networks. Leading agencies and businesses worldwide rely on TRM to make the world safer and more secure.

TRM's government cloud environment gives public sector investigators the same real-time analytical power our commercial customers rely on, and this role keeps that environment fast, reliable, and compliant as it scales. You'll join the Data Platform Serving team, working on the StarRocks-backed serving layer that sits underneath government cloud investigations, alongside the engineer who currently owns this domain solo. This is a chance to build hands-on distributed systems experience in one of the most operationally demanding environments at TRM: a regulated, high-availability government cloud deployment.

The impact you will have

• You will own 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.
• You will 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.
• You will 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.
• You will use AI-assisted debugging and log analysis to triage production issues in a regulated environment, turning multi-hour investigations into rapid root-cause fixes.

What we’re looking for

• U.S. citizenship is required for this role due to government cloud data access requirements.
• Hands-on experience operating distributed OLAP or serving-layer systems (StarRocks, Trino, ClickHouse, or similar), including query tuning and performance optimization at scale.
• Experience owning data pipeline reliability and incident response, and comfort using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, or similar) to accelerate debugging, code review, and documentation.
• Independent ownership mindset: you can pick up an unfamiliar piece of production infrastructure, use AI-assisted research and code exploration to ramp quickly, and take on-call responsibility with minimal oversight.

About the Team

• The Data Platform Serving team owns the layer that turns TRM's data into fast, reliable answers for the teams and systems built on top of it.
• We're distributed, not distant: the team communicates constantly across Slack and async docs, with a bias toward direct, evidence-based technical discussion.
• Decisions are made close to the data: engineers who operate the systems make the calls on archite

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