Real-Time Data Platform Lead — Remote

Unchain Data; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly culture

Job summary

Kraken, a fully remote crypto company, seeks a leader for its Data Platform team to own streaming and real-time data infrastructure across trading, risk, and analytics. You will architect systems using Kafka, Spark, and RisingWave, and drive AI-powered automation and self-healing workflows at scale.

Responsibilities include mentoring senior engineers, aligning roadmaps with product and compliance, and evolving the data-lake/warehouse for batch and streaming workloads.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data engineering or distributed systems
• 3+ years managing engineering teams
• Experience building data lakes in AWS (Spark, Athena, Iceberg, Parquet, Presto) including data modeling
• Strong expertise in real-time data systems (Kafka, Spark Streaming, Debezium, CDC pipelines)
• Ability to align platform investments with product, finance, compliance, analytics, and other teams
• Excellent communication to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience designing or adopting AI/ML-powered automation in data workflows
• Proficiency in Python, Scala, or Java in production data platforms
• Cloud-native data infrastructure experience on AWS (Glue, Athena, S3, EMR, Lambda)
• Track record of recruiting and developing remote engineering teams
• Ability to translate long-term vision into executable quarterly roadmaps
• Servant-leadership style and passion for high team performance
• AI-ready mindset to boost team efficiency and output

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of senior data platform engineers
• Own the architecture and roadmap for high-volume data systems
• Design scalable data architecture serving trading, risk, analytics, and product teams
• Drive AI automation and intelligent workflows in data pipelines
• Partner with ML/AI, analytics and product teams to deliver platform capabilities
• Evolve data-lake and warehouse architecture for batch and streaming workloads
• Set technical direction balancing reliability, velocity, and cost at scale
• Hire, mentor, and retain top-tier remote engineers

Skills

Data engineering

Engineering leadership

Distributed systems

Python

Scala

Java

AWS

Data lakes

Real-time data

Tools

Kafka

Apache Spark

Iceberg

RisingWave

Apache Flink

Debezium

CDC pipelines

Parquet

Athena

Glue

S3

Job description

Kraken, a fully remote crypto company, seeks a leader for its Data Platform team to own streaming and real-time data infrastructure across trading, risk, and analytics. You will architect systems using Kafka, Spark, and RisingWave, and drive AI-powered automation and self-healing workflows at scale.

Responsibilities include mentoring senior engineers, aligning roadmaps with product and compliance, and evolving the data-lake/warehouse for batch and streaming workloads.