Senior Data Platform Engineer

Tatari; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Health insurance coverage for you and

401K, FSA, and commuter benefits

Unlimited PTO & sick days

Hybrid RTO: 2 days in office

Job summary

Tatari is seeking a Data Platform Engineer to ensure reliability and operational health of the data platform across environments. This role emphasizes infrastructure admin, scalability, and evolving systems more than pure data engineering.

Responsibilities include deploying, monitoring, and hardening platforms; collaborating with data scientists, engineers, and product managers; and upholding strict promotion discipline from staging to prod. Hybrid in-office presence required.

Qualifications

• Operational discipline and incident prevention experience.
• 3+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering.
• High Availability architecture and blue/green deployments.
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Airflow or similar).
• Strong Linux fundamentals and scripting (Bash/Python).
• Distributed data processing with Spark or PySpark.
• Containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes/Docker).
• Data ingestion, ETL, or streaming systems (Kafka, Flink).
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm).
• OLAP/OLTP databases (Postgres/Redshift/Clickhouse).
• Monitoring, logging, observability tools (Datadog/Prometheus).
• Managed data platforms (Databricks).
• Network fundamentals and security basics.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability and availability of data platform infrastructure across environments.
• Define and uphold deployment SOPs and change management.
• Instrument and monitor platform health; build meaningful alerts.
• Contribute to architecture and deployment discussions; push back when needed.
• Collaborate with data scientists, engineers, and product managers on infra needs.
• Identify and remediate reliability risks before incidents occur.
• Support customer-facing and internal systems with stability as a priority.

Skills

SRE / Platform engineering

Cloud infrastructure

Linux fundamentals

Kubernetes

Data processing (Spark/PySpark)

Docker

Terraform

Postgres / Redshift / OLAP

Monitoring / observability

Databricks

Kafka / streaming

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Airflow

Databricks

Kafka

Job description

Tatari is on a mission to revolutionize TV advertising. Founded in 2016 to help transform the antiquated world of TV advertising through the intelligent application of AI and machine learning, Tatari helps some of the world’s fastest growing brands including Chime, Calm, Tecovas, Manscaped, Saatva, and Liquid I.V., reach their customers using linear and streaming TV ads. Our platform combines sophisticated media buying with proprietary analytics to turn TV advertising into an automated, digital-like experience, enabling businesses of any size to advertise on TV.

This is a systems and infrastructure position first. As a Data Platform Engineer, you will be responsible for the reliability, stability, and operational health of our data platform — including how it is deployed, monitored, maintained, and promoted across environments. Data engineering skills are a plus and will be developed on the job; what we cannot teach is operational discipline.

If you have spent your career keeping production systems alive, know what it feels like to break prod and never want to do it again, and treat lower environments as non-negotiable gates rather than suggestions — we want to talk to you.

This is not a data engineering role. You will not spend most of your time writing jobs or consuming the platform. You will be administering, scaling, hardening, and evolving it.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability and availability of our data platform infrastructure across all environments
• Enforce and improve environment promotion discipline — staging is not prod, and prod is sacred
• Define and uphold SOPs around deployments, maintenance windows, and change management
• Instrument and monitor platform health using observability tooling; build alerting that means something
• Participate in architecture and deployment discussions; push back when something isn't ready
• Collaborate with data scientists, engineers, and product managers on infrastructure needs — as a partner, not an order-taker
• Identify and remediate reliability risks before they become incidents
• Support customer-facing and internal systems with a bias toward stability over velocity

The right candidate leans SRE. Data platform experience is additive — we will train the right person. Bullets marked with * are strongly preferred; all others are meaningful signal.

Qualifications

• Operational instinct — "the fear" — you've been burned by prod, you respect it, and you've built habits around it. You know what a proper maintenance window looks like, you communicate before you touch production, and you don't spin up new initiatives while something critical is still burning in.
• 3+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering (AWS preferred; GCP/Azure experience translates)
• High Availability architecture: blue/green deployments, data replication, load balancing
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Airflow or similar DAG-based schedulers — or general job scheduling/cron systems at scale)
• Strong Linux fundamentals and scripting (Bash, Python, or similar)
• Distributed data processing (Spark, PySpark, or similar big data frameworks — or experience managing clusters that run them)
• Containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker, or similar)
• Data ingestion, ETL, or streaming systems (Kafka, Flink, or similar — or experience operating message queues and pipelines)
• Infrastructure-as-code and provisioning (Terraform, Helm, or similar)
• OLAP and OLTP databases (Clickhouse, Postgres, Redshift, or similar — query patterns, indexing, and operational care)
• Monitoring, logging, and observability (Datadog, Prometheus, Kibana, or similar)
• Managed data platforms (Databricks or similar — administering and scaling, not just consuming)
• Network infrastructure fundamentals: load balancers, DNS, auto-scaling, multi-region topologies, proxies
• Security and access management: least-privilege, secrets management, controls for data systems
• MLOps concepts or tooling — a plus

We are explicitly willing to trade depth in data tooling for the right operational character. Specifically:

What we value above technical skills

• Humility — you don't know everything, you say so, and you ask before acting in unfamiliar territory
• Methodical execution — you minimize variables, you don't premature-optimize, you finish what you started before starting something new
• Communication — you tell the team what you're doing before you do it, especially in shared or production environments
• Ownership — when something goes wrong, you look inward first
• Independence – you can drive projects end-to-end, from ambiguous requirements to high quality deliverables. But you aren’t afraid to ask for help.
• Total compensation ($190,000 - $240,000)
• Equity compensation
• Health insurance coverage for you and your dependents
• 401K, FSA, and commuter benefits
• $150 monthly spending account
• $1,000 annual continued education benefit
• $500 Newbie Productivity Perk
• Unlimited PTO and sick days
• Monthly Company Wellness Day Off
• Snacks, drinks, and catered lunches at the office
• Team building events
• Hybrid RTO of 2 days per week in office.

At Tatari, we believe in the importance of cultivating teams with diverse backgrounds and offering equal opportunities to all. We strive to create a welcoming, inclusive environment where every team member feels valued and diversity is celebrated..

#LI-HYBRID