Senior Software Engineer, Big Data
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. Our innovative platform offers advertisers unprecedented flexibility. 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. The Senior Software Engineer, Big Data will own the design, delivery, and reliability of the core data systems powering our platform. You will strengthen our data platform capabilities as we continue scaling our systems and AI-driven initiatives, serving as a central force in managing our data warehouse and driving large-scale data initiatives like ML feature projection. In this role, you will work across the full data lifecycle—building, optimizing, and scaling pipelines that power analytics, machine learning, and activation across billions of events and diverse data sources.
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience working with a managed language such as Java or .NET, building production-grade systems.
- Extensive hands-on experience with Spark in production environments, including scaling large datasets in both Spark and SQL.
- Proven track record designing, decomposing, and delivering high-scale production services or distributed systems.
- Experience building and operating systems in cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Independently drive technical initiatives from problem definition to deployment, taking full accountability for outcomes without needing granular direction.
- Ability to articulate technical tradeoffs and decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders across engineering, science, and product teams.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with high-volume, low-latency data systems
- Background in distributed systems design for large-scale architectures
- Proficiency in Python
- Familiarity with tools such as Flink, ClickHouse, or Kafka
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end design and delivery of large-scale data ingestion, warehousing, and processing pipelines across billions of daily events—proactively accounting for scalability, failure modes, and security from the start. This includes core data workflows such as the identity graph, ML feature pipelines, and warehouse workload distribution.
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and improve highly available data systems including low-latency data streams and distributed query workloads. Lead blameless post-mortems and implement long-term systemic fixes to prevent incident recurrence.
- Write and optimize complex SQL and Spark queries, extend modern big data tooling (Spark, Flink, Iceberg, ClickHouse, AWS EMR/S3), and strengthen the team through high-quality code reviews, technical mentorship, and exemplary technical artifacts such as design docs and architecture diagrams.
- Exercise strong judgment to balance long-term data platform health with rapid development velocity—particularly when driving ML feature projection work across large datasets and solving cross-team issues quickly with a small, focused team.
- Partner with Science, Machine Learning, Product, and Engineering leadership to align technical solutions with business priorities around AI-driven initiatives, including feature engineering, feature projections, and identity graph development.
Benefits
- Medical, Dental and Vision plan for US employees & Extended Health Benefits for Canadian employees
- 12 weeks paid parental leave + 4 weeks WFH
- Unlimited PTO + Work-From-Anywhere August
- Career development with clear advancement paths
- Equity for all employees
- Hybrid work model & daily team lunch
- Health & wellness stipend + cell phone reimbursement
- 401(k) & RRSP with employer match
- Parking (CA, WA, Vancouver offices) & pre-tax commuter benefits
- Employee Assistance Program
- Comprehensive onboarding (Cognitiv University)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
