Platform Engineer - Data (SDE-3 / Staff)
Weekday AI India
Technology, Information and Internet · 11-50 employees
About the role
You will design, build, and operate a large-scale shared data platform while driving architecture and production reliability. The role involves developing platform services, ingestion systems, and metadata governance to enable engineering teams to manage data independently.
What they look for
Requirements
Candidates must have 7+ years of experience in platform or software engineering with a focus on distributed systems and production-grade development. Strong hands-on expertise in data lakehouse technologies, streaming, and cloud-native infrastructure is required.
Full description
This role is for one of Weekday’s clients
Min Experience: 7+ years Location: India JobType: full-time
We are looking for a hands-on Platform Engineer – Data (SDE-3 / Staff) to take ownership of a large-scale, billion-row shared data platform and help scale it from its current state to the next level of reliability, performance, and usability.
This is a data platform engineering role, not a business ETL or analytics-pipeline delivery position. You will design, build, and operate the foundational systems that product and engineering teams rely on. The role requires strong distributed-systems expertise, production engineering skills, and the ability to drive architecture while remaining deeply involved in coding and operations.
What You’ll Own• Build and evolve open-lakehouse foundations using technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Apache Hudi, including table lifecycle management, partitioning, data layout, compaction, schema evolution, catalog management, and query operations.
- Design and operate batch and streaming ingestion systems, including CDC, data contracts, deduplication, checkpointing, replay, recovery, and failure handling.
- Develop platform services, APIs, and self-service capabilities that enable engineering and product teams to consume and manage data independently without creating unnecessary dependencies on a central platform team.
- Build and manage orchestration and workload execution systems across Kubernetes and workflow technologies such as Prefect, Argo, or Airflow.
- Establish robust metadata, lineage, governance, data quality, and observability capabilities across the platform.
- Own production reliability and operational excellence, including incident response, SLAs, data freshness, performance and cost optimization, capacity planning, and recovery improvements.
- Establish engineering standards and architectural patterns that enable the platform to scale across teams and workloads.
What We’re Looking For• Typically 7+ years of software or platform engineering experience, with demonstrated SDE-3 / Staff-level ownership and impact, regardless of current job title.
- Proven, hands-on experience owning a shared data platform in production, rather than exclusively building pipelines or applications on top of an existing platform.
- Strong expertise in distributed-systems design and production-grade software development using one or more of Python, Java, Go, or Scala.
- Meaningful experience across batch processing, streaming, data ingestion/CDC, storage and query systems, and platform operations.
- Demonstrated ability to improve reliability, scalability, performance, cost efficiency, or developer self-service in large-scale production environments.
- Strong individual contributor who can influence architecture, establish technical standards, and drive complex engineering initiatives while remaining close to the code and operational details.
- Comfortable taking end-to-end ownership, from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, incident response, and continuous improvement.
Strong Adjacent ExperienceExperience with open-source or production-scale implementations involving:
- Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi, or Delta Lake
- Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or Debezium
- Apache Spark, Trino, or Pinot
- Kubernetes and cloud-native workload platforms
- Data catalogs, metadata platforms, lineage systems, or governance frameworks
- Data quality and observability platforms
Not a Fit For This RoleThis role is not intended for candidates whose experience is primarily focused on:
- BI or reporting
- Analytics engineering
- Data warehouse modeling
- Business-facing ETL development only
- Generic backend engineering without significant data-platform ownership
- Assembly and configuration of managed services without deep platform engineering ownership
- Narrow ownership of a single infrastructure or data component
- People-management-focused roles without substantial hands-on engineering involvement
Must-Have Skills• Data Platform
- Distributed Systems
Good-to-Have Skills• Apache Iceberg
- Apache Hudi
- Delta Lake
Role LevelSDE-3 / Staff Engineer
Experience: Typically 7+ years
