Senior Software Engineer, Attribution & Events

Cognitiv•Vancouver, BC

16h•CA$150,000 - CA$190,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Cognitiv, we are industry trailblazers redefining media buying with our Deep Learning Advertising Platform. Since 2015, we have harnessed the power of cutting-edge deep learning technology and data science to transform how brands connect with their customers. Our mission is to bring intelligence to advertising and deliver unparalleled precision, relevance, and impact at scale. With our innovative platform, advertisers enjoy unprecedented flexibility—whether it is activating Dynamic Deals through their preferred DSP, leveraging our managed service DSP, or utilizing our industry-first ContextGPT product. As a part of Cognitiv, you will be at the forefront of AI-driven advertising solutions, driving change and achieving remarkable growth in a rapidly evolving industry. This position will be located in Vancouver BC with a hybrid work schedule of 3 days in office (Mon/Tue/Wed) and 2 days remote optional (Thursday/Friday).

Requirements

Big Data & OLAP: Deep hands-on experience with a columnar/OLAP store (ClickHouse strongly preferred; Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or other petabyte scale big data experience acceptable). Experience designing schemas, tuning queries, and operating at billion-row scale.
SQL Fluency: Advanced SQL experience including partitioning strategies, large-scale joins, window functions, materialized views, query tuning, and cost-aware analytical patterns.
High-Throughput Event Systems: Experience building pipelines handling millions to billions of events per day, including ingestion, deduplication, late-arriving data, and backfills.
Backend Proficiency: Strong programming skills in C# / .NET Core (DI, hosted services, ASP.NET Web APIs) or comparable backend stack with ability to ramp quickly. Comfortable owning services end-to-end (schema, migrations, deploys, on-call).
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS experience (S3, SSM/Parameter Store, IAM basics).
Engineering Discipline: Strong testing mindset with integration tests against real databases; improves infrastructure rather than working around it.
Operational Mindset: Strong understanding of reliability, observability, and maintainable system design for data pipelines and analytical systems.
Ownership: Ability to independently drive technical initiatives from problem definition to deployment.
Communication: Able to clearly explain technical tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Ad-tech experience (RTB, DSP/SSP, attribution, incrementality, identity graphs, LiveRamp, IAB standards)

Responsibilities

Lead Technical Design: Own end-to-end delivery of high-volume data services — from ClickHouse schema and partitioning to ingestion pipelines to the C# services on top — accounting for scalability, failure modes, and cost up front.
Build & Scale the Data Backbone: Architect ClickHouse-backed pipelines that ingest, store, and query billions of ad events (impressions, conversions, identity signals). Own loaders, partitioning, materialized views, and query optimization end-to-end.
Operationalize via Backend Services: Build C# / .NET Core 8 services that power attribution, incrementality measurement, and campaign management on top of the data layer.
Integrate Identity & Event Sources: Ingest events from LiveRamp, pixels, CTV, and IP-based signals; integrate identity graphs and resolve cross-vendor IDs at scale.
Elevate Reliability: Identify bottlenecks across the data path, improve observability (ingestion lag, query latency, data quality), lead blameless post-mortems, and implement long-term systemic fixes.
Drive Engineering Excellence: Strengthen the team through high-quality code and SQL reviews, mentorship, and strong design docs, data models, and query patterns.
Navigate Ambiguity: Make strong calls on the open questions, balancing long-term data architecture health with development velocity.
Collaborate on Direction: Partner with Product, Science, and Engineering to align technical work with measurement and business priorities.