Technical Lead, Data Platform

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS

Architecture & Design Leadership

• Define platform and data architecture direction in partnership with other tech leads and senior engineers
• Lead and guide the engineers to do design reviews through RFCs, peer discussion, and structured technical feedback
• Represent the team in cross-domain technical forums (schemas, Kafka workflows, data governance, etc.)
• Establish repeatable patterns and engineering best practices that raise the engineering bar across the organization

Backlog & Delivery

• Partner with engineering and product stakeholders to run backlog processes and set clear priorities
• Lead sprint planning, including effort estimation, team allocation, and acceptance criteria (definition of done)
• Facilitate daily stand-ups and drive active engagement and accountability
• Maintain and facilitate consistent PR review throughput and ensure healthy peer review practices

Operational Excellence

• Own SLA-setting and reviews in collaboration with engineering management
• Maintain and improve runbooks, on-call documentation, and incident workflows
• Act as incident commander during P0/P1 events and coordinate cross-functional response
• Ensure post-incident reviews lead to measurable improvements in reliability and observability

Technical Contribution

• Balance technical leadership with direct contributions to the codebase, spending meaning fulltime on hands‑on coding to remain close to implementation details.
• Ship critical-path features and guide others in delivering scalable, maintainable solutions
• Mentor engineers through pairing, code reviews, and knowledge-sharing

Documentation & Knowledge Management

• Maintain up-to-date documentation for runbooks, RFCs, architectural decisions, and incident workflows
• Promote a documentation-first, async-friendly culture that supports distributed collaboration

Mentorship & Coaching

• Mentor engineers to deliver independently by helping them break down ambiguous problems and scope work effectively
• Provide technical guidance and clarify project direction as needed
• Foster a culture of collaboration and teamwork by pairing with engineers on complex challenges and on-call issues
• Coach engineers on writing RFCs and presenting technical designs to broader audiences

Leadership Expectations

• Be confident and data driven in decision-making
• Advocate for engineering best practices even when inconvenient
• Balance coding time with leadership, facilitation, and mentoring
• Foster a culture of clear documentation, healthy debate, and ownership
• Communicate proactively across teams and functions

OTHER SKILLS & ABILITIES

• Track record of leading architectural decisions and driving technical alignment across teams
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to facilitate technical discussions and drive decisions
• Strong documentation habits and commitment to reducing tribal knowledge
• Data warehouses: Snowflake
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty, Data quality/governance experience Schema management: Schema Registry, Protobuf, Avro

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Languages: Python or any other higher-level programming language, proficiency in SQL
• Streaming: Kafka, redpanda or any other streaming service
• Batch: dbt or equivalent tool
• Cloud: AWS/GCP/Azure
• Databases: PostgreSQL or equivalent
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, docker
• CI/CD: Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions

EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, Math, or related field; Equivalent experience will be considered
• High School Diploma or GED equivalency required
• 4+ years of software engineering experience in data platform and infrastructure
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale data platforms or distributed data systems
• Strong proficiency in backend languages commonly used in data engineering (e.g., Python,Java, Scala, Go)
• Hands-on experience with streaming technologies (Kafka, Redpanda, Materialize, or similar) and data pipeline orchestration

Certification and Licenses

• Professional certification may be required in some cases

Physical Requirements

• Job may require extended sitting or standing, use of standard office equipment.