Senior Data Platform Engineer

Medium

6d • $165,000 - $205,000 • Remote

About The Position

We're looking for a Senior Engineer to play a key role in Medium's Data Platform team, building and evolving the data infrastructure that powers Medium’s business. As a member of the data platform team, you'll own the reliability, performance, and long-term architecture of the systems that data scientists and engineers at Medium depend on every day—everything from ingestion and transformation to orchestration and observability. The work you do will ensure that readers and writers on Medium can receive personalized recommendations, view up-to-date writer stats, make subscription payments without friction, and reach the right readers with each post.
This isn't a pure data engineering role; it's part data engineering, part DevOps, part SRE, and part backend software engineering, with the massive opportunity to help transform a collection of aging systems into a modern foundation that engineers across the org are proud to build on. The role is equal parts stewardship and transformation, and we’re looking for someone who can keep critical systems running reliably while also moving us toward our vision of a modern, well-instrumented data platform. If you’re someone who finds both of those things interesting—someone who can triage a pipeline failure in the morning and spend the afternoon thinking through a migration strategy, keeping the long-term vision in mind—this might be the role for you.

Requirements

• 4–6 years of experience across data engineering, backend engineering, DevOps, or SRE, and you’re comfortable wearing multiple hats (sometimes at once). You're a generalist who thrives in ambiguity who doesn’t need the perfect playbook; but you can figure out what the right thing to do is and do it!
• Proficient in Python. Our data platform is primarily Python-based, and strong Python skills are essential. We'll expect candidates to demonstrate Python proficiency during the interview process.
• Comfortable working across the stack. You've worked with data pipeline tooling (Snowflake, dbt, Spark, or similar), cloud infrastructure (AWS), and at least some backend services work. You don't need to be an expert in all of them, but you need to be able to learn quickly in any of them.
• Approach legacy systems with curiosity. You can assess tech debt pragmatically, work within short-term constraints, and advocate for sustainable improvements over time.
• Care about your downstream users and understand that the measure of a great platform is whether the engineers who depend on it can do their jobs well
• Good instincts about systems, and are adaptable and eager to learn. You can advocate for an approach while remaining genuinely open to better ideas. This is a team that values collaboration and psychological safety, and we want someone who adds to that culture.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Snowflake, Kubernetes, data observability tooling, or ML infrastructure is a plus.
• Experience using AI to improve a team’s leverage, reach, output and impact
• You’re comfortable operating without a dedicated PM layer: you've owned product/platform direction, not just technical execution
• You personally use Medium and are genuinely excited to contribute to its mission: empowering humans to write meaningfully for other humans

Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and modernize the data infrastructure that Medium's product and engineering teams depend on to do their best work
• Own reliability of our data infrastructure: Identify risks, instrument better observability, and drive improvements that reduce toil for the whole org
• Bring a product mindset to platform ownership, partnering with engineers and stakeholders across teams to understand their data infrastructure needs and help design systems they can use and trust
• Contribute to the long-term platform roadmap, including migration of end-of-life systems toward modern, maintainable alternatives
• Write and review Python-based tooling for pipeline orchestration, data quality, and infrastructure automation
• Apply DevOps and SRE best practices: think about uptime, monitoring, alerting, and deployment practices as first-class concerns
• Mentor teammates and improve shared standards around reliability, documentation, and platform ergonomics
• Attend Medium's twice-yearly, in-person offsites (hosted in locations around the U.S.)

Benefits

• Working with a fully distributed team: We’re fully remote and have teammates across the U.S. & France
• Healthcare benefits covered at 100% for employees and 80% for dependents
• Generous parental leave policy
• Mental health support through Spring Health (or find a provider through Rula or Kaiser Mental Health Network)
• Financial wellness support through Northstar
• Stipends for co-working, professional development, wifi, and a one-time home office bonus
• Unlimited PTO and standard company holidays
• A discounted Medium membership

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed