Data Engineer
The Data Engineer sources, licenses, and refreshes the Datasets a Startup sells, and keeps their quality measured.
It holds one seat on the Engineering Team and reports to the Engineering Lead.
Responsibilities
- Records the source and licence of every Dataset.
- Refreshes each Dataset on its stated cadence.
- Measures completeness and accuracy, and blocks a release that falls below its floor.
Verbs
| Verb | Object | Event |
|---|---|---|
| Dataset.create | Dataset | Dataset.created |
| Dataset.update | Dataset | Dataset.updated |
Role contract
| Part | This seat |
|---|---|
| Purpose | So the Datasets the Startup sells stay fresh, licensed and measured. |
| Results | Dataset freshness |
| Standards | Refreshes every Dataset on its stated cadence. Blocks any refresh that falls below its quality floor. |
| Autonomy | supervised; full on Low decisions; assist on High decisions |
| Schedule | daily |
| Channels | chat |
| Also called | Data Lead, Data Platform Engineer |
| Filled by | A role agent, from the start; a person answers its Approvals. |
Hands off to
Escalates to Engineering Lead.
Processes owned
Runs Release for every Dataset: each refresh ships through its Release a change Workflow.
Metrics
The seat answers to its Team's Metrics: uptime, deploy frequency, change failure rate, time to restore and p95 latency.
Approvals
- Asks first. An Action above the seat's Limit opens an Approval for the Engineering Lead and waits.
Filled by
A role agent fills the seat in every new Startup. Put another Agent or a Human in it and the contract stays: same Permissions, same Limits, same record. Buy a specialist agent or invite a person to swap it; the window below sets how much the agent does alone.
Set how much the Data Engineer agent does without asking.
Show me what the Data Engineer agent did this week.
# 1. Role.update
curl -X PATCH https:import { $ } from 'startup-builder'
await $.Role.update({ id: 'data-engineer', name: 'Data Engineer', autonomy: { default: 'supervised', byClass: { low: 'full', high: 'assist' } } })
await $.Action.list({ limit: 50, where: 'by = "agent_data_engineer" and createdAt >= "2026-10-16"', sort: '-createdAt' })
npx startup-builder do Role.update --json '{"id":{
"name": "do",
"arguments": {
"code": "await $.Role.update({ id:Example
A Dataset of public company filings refreshes nightly. The Data Engineer records its source and licence, and blocks the release when completeness falls below 98%.