Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Data Platform

About The Role We build and run the distributed platform behind our data ingestion, processing, and governance layer. It is a set of independently deployable services handling different types of data where correctness, lineage, and reliability matter as much as raw throughput. We're hiring a Senior Engineer to own a meaningful slice of that platform. This is a hands-on software engineering role, not a pipeline(tool)-configuration role — you will design services, run them in production, and shape where the architecture goes next. What You'll Do Own services in our data platform end to end — design, build, deploy, and operate them Build and evolve streaming and batch pipelines from ingestion through to governed, queryable data Make the platform debuggable at scale: SLOs, lineage, schema evolution, backpressure, replay, and failure recovery Contribute to architecture decisions — and argue against the ones you think are wrong Work alongside our ML and GenAI teams, whose workloads depend on the data this platform produces What We're Looking For 5+ years building production backend or data systems, including time in a distributed or microservices environment Strong JVM (Java) engineering — most of our platform is JVM-based Solid SQL, plus hands-on experience with at least one columnar/analytical or NoSQL store Practical experience with distributed event streaming — Kafka or equivalent. Stream and batch processing frameworks (Spark, Flink etc) are a plus Comfort operating what you build: containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, production debugging A structured, evidence-driven approach to problems — you reason about system behaviour rather than guessing at it BSc/MSc in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience Preferred Qualifications Schema management and data contracts (Avro/Protobuf, schema registry, compatibility strategy) Change data capture and event-driven integration patterns Open table formats and lakehouse storage (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi), Parquet, object storage Data governance tooling — catalog, lineage, and data quality (OpenLineage, DataHub, OpenMetadata, or similar) Real-time analytical stores (ClickHouse, StarRocks, Druid, Trino) OpenTelemetry-based observability; Terraform or GitOps workflows Experience with data feeding ML, LLM, or retrieval/RAG workloads If you're strong on the core and curious about the rest, we'd like to hear from you. How We Work Small teams with real ownership — you'll be on the design decisions, not handed a ticket queue Code review and release responsibility in each development iteration We use AI coding assistants day to day. We expect fluency with them, and equally the judgment to know when not to lean on them — you own what ships either way.