Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion Platform

Role overview A Staff Software Engineer will lead the development and evolution of a large-scale Ingestion Platform that powers distributed data movement for a high-traffic internet property. The position centers on designing streaming and batch infrastructure that underpins critical user journeys and serves as the backbone for downstream product, ads, and machine learning teams.

Responsibilities - Architect and ship reliable distributed software for streaming and batch data movement, with emphasis on availability, scalability, latency, correctness, and cost efficiency. - Own the platform's control plane and data plane, including pipeline APIs, controllers, connectors, schemas, and sink integrations. - Expand ingestion paths beyond Kafka-to-BigQuery, adding production-ready routes to S3/GCS and Apache Iceberg, along with reusable capabilities such as transformations, deduplication, and dead-letter queues. - Build modular, extensible connectors and abstractions for systems including Kafka, BigQuery, S3, GCS, Iceberg, Flink, and other data stores. - Improve the self-service experience for internal users through clear APIs, safe defaults, automated provisioning, documentation, onboarding workflows, and actionable observability and alerting. - Lead migrations from bespoke and legacy ingestion systems into the platform in partnership with adjacent data and ML infrastructure teams. - Establish reliability, security, and operational practices for pipelines running across Kubernetes clusters, including schema evolution, workload identity, permissions, deployment safety, monitoring, and incident response. - Mentor and guide engineers across multiple teams, raising the bar for technical design, operational excellence, and customer focus.

Requirements - 10+ years of hands-on experience building internet-scale distributed systems, data infrastructure, or developer platforms. - Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. - Strong software development background in one or more general-purpose languages such as Go, Python, Java, or Scala. - Deep experience designing and operating high-throughput, fault-tolerant data pipelines or platform services, spanning both streaming and batch workloads. - Hands-on familiarity with data movement systems such as Kafka, BigQuery, S3, GCS, Apache Iceberg, Flink, or comparable technologies. - Experience designing platform APIs and abstractions, including schema evolution and serialization patterns.

Nice to have - Experience building low-code or self-service developer platforms, or strong curiosity to learn this area.

Benefits and work setup - Base salary range of $217,000 to $303,900 USD, plus equity in the form of restricted stock units, with commission eligibility depending on the role. - For U.S.-based employees: medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) program with employer match, generous vacation time off, and parental leave.