Backend Engineer

About Our Client

Our client is a leading enterprise data platform company building an open, high-performance data lakehouse for AI and analytical workloads. The platform combines an intelligent SQL query engine, an AI-ready semantic layer, and an open catalog built on Apache Iceberg — enabling Fortune 500 companies across finance, energy, manufacturing, and logistics to unify, query, and govern data at massive scale across cloud and on-premise sources.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer for the team that owns the reliability and operational excellence of a large-scale data platform, delivered both as a cloud service and as self-managed software. You will work across the full platform — observability, security, control plane, and core services — diagnosing complex issues and delivering durable fixes across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments, in close collaboration with product engineering, SRE, support, and field teams.

This is a backend platform engineering role focused on distributed systems reliability — not application development or CRUD services.

Responsibilities

• Investigate, diagnose, and resolve complex issues across cloud and self-managed deployments — distributed systems failures, performance degradation, and reliability incidents
• Own bug fixes and targeted improvements across core services, control plane, security, and observability infrastructure
• Support automated deployment and integration frameworks that enable consistent, repeatable delivery across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments
• Contribute to cluster lifecycle management, observability, and operational supportability capabilities
• Partner with SRE, support, and field teams to triage and resolve escalated customer issues
• Build runbooks, root cause analyses, and internal tooling that reduce time-to-resolution over time
• Collaborate with product engineering so that fixes are integrated back into the main codebase effectively

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of software engineering experience with strong hands-on Java development at production scale
• Proficiency in Python and Bash for scripting, automation, and tooling
• Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and multi-threaded / asynchronous programming models
• Experience designing, debugging, and operating large-scale distributed systems or microservices
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker across cloud, hybrid, or on-premises deployments
• Cloud-native development experience on one or more of AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP)
• Clear communicator — able to explain problems, root causes, and solutions to technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfortable with AI-assisted development workflows — using modern AI tools productively while critically validating their output
• English Upper-Intermediate or higher (B2+) — daily written and verbal communication with a US-based engineering team
• Availability to work EU business hours shifted 2–3 hours later for daily overlap with US West Coast mornings

Desired Skills

• Observability platforms: OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, logging
• Background in data processing, data warehouse, data lake, or analytics systems
• Distributed file and object storage: S3, ADLS, or HDFS
• Infrastructure-as-code (Helm, Terraform) and CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, ArgoCD)
• Identity, authentication, and authorization systems: SSO, OAuth, SAML, RBAC
• NoSQL databases (MongoDB, RocksDB), Redis, or partner/OEM integration patterns
• Query processing, concurrency control, data replication, or storage systems

Details

• Engagement: Long-term contract
• Location: Europe (EU / EEA / UK), remote
• Working hours: EU business hours, shifted 2–3 hours later for daily overlap with the US West Coast team