Senior Data Platform Engineer: Build Self-Serve Data Contracts

Smartly; Helsinki; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity options

Career development opportunities

Job summary

Smartly is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to build the data platform that supports governed data sharing across services, analytics, and AI/ML. You will shape early platform paths, publishing contracts, schemas, and lineage, while turning production problems into scalable solutions.

You will work with PostgreSQL databases, Debezium CDC, and Kafka, building GitOps workflows and self-service tooling to enable rapid, safe data publishing. Collaboration with multiple teams is essential.

Qualifications

• Strong experience building and operating production software systems.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems trade-offs and ownership boundaries.
• Practical experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases.
• Experience with Kafka, CDC, Debezium, or related data-movement tech.

Responsibilities

• Design and build platform services, tools, and workflows for contract-driven data publishing and consumption.
• Build the first production path for platform-managed PostgreSQL publishing tables, Debezium CDC, Kafka topics, and catalog registration.
• Create GitOps-style workflows where contracts, schemas, ownership, lifecycle, compatibility, policy metadata, and runtime state are reviewed as code.
• Build tooling that gives product engineers fast feedback before they publish or change data products.
• Help define how Smartly models data products, publishing contracts, schema evolution, and access policy.
• Operate and improve the CDC runtime model, including Kubernetes workloads, offsets, and recovery.
• Integrate platform metadata into DataHub for discovery and lineage tracing.
• Collaborate with product, infra, data engineering, analytics, and ML teams to standardize the path.

Skills

Production systems

Distributed systems

English communication

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kafka

Debezium

Kubernetes

DataHub

Job description

Smartly is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to build the data platform that supports governed data sharing across services, analytics, and AI/ML. You will shape early platform paths, publishing contracts, schemas, and lineage, while turning production problems into scalable solutions.

You will work with PostgreSQL databases, Debezium CDC, and Kafka, building GitOps workflows and self-service tooling to enable rapid, safe data publishing. Collaboration with multiple teams is essential.