Senior Backend Engineer — Data-Driven Commodities Platform

Socket.dev; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Kpler, a global data platform, is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to help generalise the S&D data model across commodities and to evolve the shared ETL framework. You will own the publication reliability end-to-end, drive non-functional improvements, and shape API contracts for external clients.

You will collaborate with Product and Research, lead design reviews, and mentor mid-level engineers to grow into senior roles.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, with experience delivering production systems.
• Experience delivering technically ambiguous, business-critical projects end to end, owning the design, the trade-offs and the production outcome, not just the implementation.
• Deep experience building and running data-intensive backends in Python (ETL/orchestration, relational data modelling, SQL/Postgres).
• Owning systems in production: on-call, observability, incident response and the prevention work afterwards ("you build it, you run it").
• Experience setting technical direction for a team and being the person other engineers consult on hard design decisions.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction of generalising the S&D data model from crude oil to all commodities, owning the trade-offs between debt, design, reliability and time-to-market as the crew's call.
• Evolve the shared ETL Framework (Reader → Transformer → Writer) into the reusable foundation every commodity vertical builds on.
• Own publication reliability end to end: the anomaly-detection guardrail, the release path, and the data-quality bar that decides whether a balance is fit to ship to customers.
• Set and raise the non-functional bar (reliability, latency, observability, security, cost) across the crew's Python engine, TypeScript data-distribution APIs and Airflow orchestration.
• Shape the external + webapp data-distribution API contract that external clients depend on: versioning, pagination, backward compatibility.
• Lead design reviews within the crew and steward the crew's ADRs; bring engineering alignment to ambiguous, business-critical work.
• Own the response to critical incidents in the crew's systems, and drive the preventative work that follows so the same class of failure does not recur.
• Partner directly with Product and the Research team to shape the crew's technical and feature roadmap, including the SuDeP pipeline that Research consumes.
• Mentor mid-level (P3) engineers toward senior scope, and act as a cross-crew technical consultant within the Commodities Tribe and the wider Engineering chapter.

Skills

Data-intensive backend design

Production systems ownership

Technical leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Python

Airflow

TypeScript/NestJS

Terraform

ArgoCD

Kubernetes

Job description

Kpler, a global data platform, is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to help generalise the S&D data model across commodities and to evolve the shared ETL framework. You will own the publication reliability end-to-end, drive non-functional improvements, and shape API contracts for external clients.

You will collaborate with Product and Research, lead design reviews, and mentor mid-level engineers to grow into senior roles.