Lead Engineer - Backend (Data Platform)

## About the Role
We are looking for a Lead Engineer — Backend / Data Platform to provide technical leadership for backend and data-intensive systems powering analytics, reporting, experimentation, and behavioural insights across Wingify <> AB Tasty. This is a hands-on technical leadership role , not an engineering management position. You will continue to design systems and write production code , while also owning architecture and technical direction for significant workstreams. You will work across Java, ClickHouse, BigQuery, Bigtable, Redis, Kafka, and GCP , solving problems spanning event ingestion, distributed processing, query engines, analytical storage, low-latency serving, and reporting. A key part of the role is helping us evolve two mature analytics platforms toward a more unified data foundation without compromising the reliability of systems already serving production customers.
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## The Engineering Landscape
Our production data platform includes:
- ClickHouse — self-hosted and ClickHouse Cloud for high-volume analytics and SaaS reporting
- BigQuery — large-scale analytics and data processing
- Bigtable — low-latency NoSQL serving
- Redis — caching, queues, and distributed coordination
- Kafka — high-volume real-time event streaming
- GCP — GCS, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, IAM, Secret Manager, GKE and VMs
- Java — Spring Boot and JVM-based backend services
- Apache Beam / Dataflow — distributed event and batch processing
- Go — adjacent SQL and reporting services
Alongside the existing platform, we are building capabilities around:
- Warehouse-native experiment computation in customer Snowflake/BigQuery environments
- Cross-platform visitor profiles and identity
- First-party cohorts and saved audiences
- Unified metrics across internal and customer warehouses
- Converging Wingify and AB Tasty analytics onto a common data foundation

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What You'll Do

Architecture & System Design

- Own the technical architecture and design of significant backend/data-platform workstreams.
- Design distributed systems for high-volume event ingestion, analytical querying, data processing, and low-latency serving .
- Make architectural decisions around data modelling, storage engines, partitioning, query patterns, caching, streaming, reliability, and cost .
- Evaluate trade-offs across ClickHouse, BigQuery, Bigtable, Redis, Kafka, and other technologies based on workload characteristics.
- Drive designs that can evolve as the Wingify and AB Tasty platforms converge.

Hands-on Engineering

- Remain hands-on with Java and production backend code .
- Build and evolve backend services, query engines, APIs, data pipelines, and distributed processing systems.
- Write and optimise complex analytical SQL and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks.
- Solve difficult production problems involving slow queries, data correctness, pipeline failures, latency, throughput, and infrastructure .
- Work with Kafka, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, GCS, ClickHouse, BigQuery, Bigtable, and Redis at production scale.
- Own critical systems through design, implementation, deployment, observability, and operation .

Technical Leadership

- Set technical direction for a platform area or major engineering workstream .
- Break ambiguous product and platform requirements into clear technical designs and execution plans.
- Review architecture and designs from other engineers and challenge assumptions constructively.
- Establish engineering practices around reliability, scalability, observability, performance, and maintainability .
- Mentor SSE-1/SSE-2 engineers and help them grow their system-design and production-engineering capabilities.
- Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Data, and Infrastructure teams.
- Influence architecture beyond your immediate projects without requiring formal people-management authority.

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What We're Looking For

- 6+ years of hands-on backend/software engineering experience , with substantial experience building distributed or data-intensive systems.
- Demonstrated ownership of architecture and system design for production systems at meaningful scale.
- Strong hands-on Java experience, including modern Java and JVM backend systems.
- Strong experience designing systems around analytical databases, data warehouses, and/or large-scale non-relational stores .
- Deep understanding of data modelling, partitioning, indexing, clustering, query execution, caching, concurrency, and performance optimisation .
- Strong SQL and analytical-querying experience.
- Experience designing and operating streaming/event-driven architectures , ideally using Kafka or equivalent technologies.
- Experience building batch and/or streaming data pipelines at scale.
- Strong cloud engineering experience; GCP is preferred.
- Experience operating production systems with clear SLOs, observability, failure handling, and performance requirements .
- Strong debugging ability across applications, distributed systems, databases, pipelines, and infrastructure.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers, reviewing technical designs, and influencing architecture .
- Ability to balance long-term platform architecture with pragmatic delivery.

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Nice to Have

- Deep production experience with ClickHouse , including schema design, MergeTree engines, partitioning, sorting keys, query optimisation, replication, and performance tuning.
- BigQuery and Bigtable at significant production scale.
- Apache Beam / Dataflow .
- Snowflake or warehouse-native compute architectures.
- Go , Vert.x, or other high-performance backend technologies.
- Experience handling billions of events and/or TB–PB scale analytical datasets .
- Experience with experimentation platforms, A/B testing, funnels, segmentation, identity resolution, cohorts, or behavioural analytics.
- Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, Prometheus, Grafana, or GCP Cloud Monitoring.

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## Core Skills
Java · System Design · Distributed Systems · Data Platform · ClickHouse · SQL · BigQuery · Bigtable · Kafka · Redis · GCP · Pub/Sub · Dataflow · ETL · Microservices · Technical Leadership