Lead Backend Engineer, Activations (Petabyte-Scale)

LiveRamp; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 157,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

LiveRamp is building a petabyte-scale activation platform that processes massive datasets across clouds. We seek an experienced engineer to shape end-to-end strategy for Activations Back End, architect scalable pipelines, and drive cost-efficient innovation.

You will lead production reliability, incident response, and mentor other engineers in a fast-paced, AI-enabled environment. The role emphasizes cloud-native design, multi-tenant fairness, and performance optimization, with opportunities to

Qualifications

• 5+ years of production-grade software development experience in a modern language.
• Strong data engineering and SQL skills with large datasets.
• Experience owning end-to-end data pipelines (ingestion, transformation, orchestration, observability).
• Cloud experience and containerized workloads (Kubernetes/GKE).
• Excellent communication and ability to mentor others.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and evolution of a petabyte-scale activation platform, delta-first and cache-aware.
• Shape end-to-end strategy for Activations Back End areas from design to rollout.
• Architect and build data pipelines using Spark/Dataproc, SingleStore, Kubernetes, and streaming systems.
• Use Temporal/Cadence to orchestrate complex workflows with retries and observability.
• Design for multi-tenant fairness and scalable scheduling to protect latency-sensitive jobs.
• Drive performance and cost optimization for petabyte-scale workloads.
• Lead production excellence: incident response and postmortems; reduce operational risk.
• Infuse AI into development and operations and promote best practices.
• Mentor engineers and represent Activations Back End in cross-team forums.

Skills

Production-grade code

Data engineering

SQL

Cloud & Kubernetes

Mentoring engineers

Tools

Spark/Dataproc

SingleStore

GKE

Pub/Sub

Kafka/Redpanda

BigQuery

Job description

LiveRamp is building a petabyte-scale activation platform that processes massive datasets across clouds. We seek an experienced engineer to shape end-to-end strategy for Activations Back End, architect scalable pipelines, and drive cost-efficient innovation.

You will lead production reliability, incident response, and mentor other engineers in a fast-paced, AI-enabled environment. The role emphasizes cloud-native design, multi-tenant fairness, and performance optimization, with opportunities to