Staff/ Senior Platform Data Engineer

We're looking for a Staff / Senior Data Platform Engineer to join our Storage Systems Tribe in the Messaging Squad.

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced engineer to make a significant impact on our messaging architecture. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, building, and scaling our Kafka infrastructure to support hundreds of millions of messages a day. Your work will directly enable hundreds of engineers to build high-volume products that meet the demands of both customer-facing applications and internal data and analytics engineering use cases.

You will be working alongside engineering colleagues to create a robust messaging platform that serves as a critical foundation for our business operations and growth.

What You'll Do

• Design and scale our Kafka architecture. Build and maintain a high-performance messaging infrastructure capable of handling hundreds of millions of daily messages with reliability and efficiency.
• Develop SDKs and abstractions. Create intuitive interfaces that enable product and feature teams to easily integrate with our messaging platform without needing to understand the underlying complexity.
• Implement operational excellence. Establish monitoring, alerting, and performance optimization practices to ensure system reliability and scalability.
• Collaborate across teams. Work closely with platform framework teams to build common tools and abstractions that streamline usage and enhance monitoring capabilities.
• Drive architectural decisions. Make key technical decisions related to storage system provisioning, tuning, and scaling to support our growing business needs.
• Support data and analytics workflows. Ensure our messaging infrastructure effectively serves internal use cases related to data engineering and analytics.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience working with storage system provisioning, tuning, and scaling. Deep knowledge of distributed systems principles and their practical application.
• Proven experience with Kafka. Strong understanding of Kafka architecture, including brokers, topics, partitions, consumer groups, and replication. Experience with NATs, ActiveMQ, or related technologies is also acceptable.
• Experience developing developer experience capabilities. Track record of creating interfaces, SDKs, and abstractions that make complex systems accessible to product and feature teams.
• Proficiency with cloud-native technologies. Experience with Kubernetes, containerization, and cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Strong programming skills. Proficiency in Java, Scala, Go, or other languages commonly used in distributed systems development.
• Experience with stream processing frameworks. Familiarity with Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, or similar technologies is a plus.
• Knowledge of data integration patterns. Understanding of CDC (Change Data Capture), ETL/ELT workflows, and event-driven architectures.
• Impact-driven mindset. You prioritize what's good for the business and supporting product engineers over working with trendy technologies.
• Commitment to simplicity. You strive for creating solutions that are simple to use and maintain, avoiding unnecessary complexity.
• Excellent communication abilities. You can effectively collaborate with diverse engineering teams and explain complex technical concepts to various stakeholders.