Founding Engineer - Data/Platform

HRB; Toronto; On-site; CAD 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking a skilled engineer to build scalable data platforms and tackle complex backend challenges. This role involves designing and optimizing data systems that power APIs and manage large-scale data processing. You'll work with advanced architectures and technologies, including Iceberg, Flink, and Kafka, while writing clean, maintainable code in Java and Node.js. If you're passionate about shaping impactful platforms and solving diverse engineering problems, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in platform engineering or data engineering.
• Strong system design skills with a focus on data workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own projects to enhance data replication, storage, and reporting capabilities.
• Build efficient streaming and batch data pipelines for core product.

Skills

Data Engineering

Java

Node.js

Kafka

Flink

Problem-Solving

System Design

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Tools

AWS Lambda

Amazon S3

GitHub Actions

AWS Glue

Job description

About the role

We’re looking for an engineer who thrives on building scalable data platforms and enjoys tackling complex backend challenges. This isn’t just a data engineering role—you’ll be designing and optimizing the data platform that powers our API, managing everything from data streaming and storage to analytics features at terabyte scale and beyond.

You should be comfortable navigating both data and backend engineering, with a solid foundation in software development. You’ll work with advanced data architectures, including Iceberg, Flink, and Kafka, tackling large-scale challenges and contributing to core product development using Java and Node.js. If you’re excited by the opportunity to shape a high-impact platform and tackle diverse engineering problems, we’d love to hear from you.

What you will do:

• Own projects aimed at enhancing data replication, storage, enrichment, and reporting capabilities.
• Build and optimize efficient streaming and batch data pipelines that support our core product and API.
• Design scalable storage solutions for handling terabytes of IoT and time-series data.
• Develop and maintain real-time data systems to ingest growing data volumes.
• Implement distributed tracing and observability patterns to improve monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Write clean, maintainable code in Java and Node.js for various platform components.
• Shape architectural decisions to ensure scalability and reliability throughout the data platform.

The ideal candidate will have:

• 4+ years of experience in platform engineering or data engineering.
• 2+ years of experience designing and optimizing data pipelines at TB to PB scale.
• Strong system design skills with a focus on data workflows.
• Familiarity with lake-house architectures (e.g., Iceberg, Delta, Hudi, Snowflake).
• Experience with real-time data processing tools like Kafka, Spark and Flink.
• Knowledge of distributed systems and large-scale data challenges.
• Proficient in Java, with a focus on clean, maintainable code.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a collaborative mindset.

Tech Stack

• Languages: JavaScript / TypeScript, Java
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): SST, AWS CDK
• Cloud Services:
  • Compute and Orchestration: AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions
  • Storage: Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB
  • Messaging and Events: Amazon SQS, Amazon EventBridge
• Data Processing: AWS Glue, Apache Flink, Kafka, Iceberg, DuckDB
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions