Senior Data Platform Engineer — ETL & Systems

WorldQuant LLC; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

WorldQuant seeks an senior developer to design, build, and operate large-scale data and ETL systems powering research and investment workflows. You will own critical systems end-to-end, drive architectural decisions, and mentor others through review and collaboration.

Role emphasizes self-direction, accountability, and ability to communicate trade-offs across teams while maintaining code quality and production stability.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software development experience.
• Mastery of at least one major language (Python, Java, Go, C++, or equivalent).
• Strong system design for distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant architectures.
• Experience building ETL/ELT pipelines and large-scale data processing.
• Deep PostgreSQL/MySQL knowledge and strong SQL skills.
• Solid CS fundamentals and design pattern expertise.
• Incident response mindset with root-cause analysis.
• Comfort with AI-assisted coding and tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and own backend services and data pipelines at scale.
• Architect data storage, processing, and data models.
• Build and maintain APIs and messaging/integration layers.
• Lead technical decisions, tool selection, and system boundaries.
• Break down ambiguous requirements into deliverable designs.
• Diagnose production issues with analytic problem solving.
• Improve engineering practices: testing, CI/CD, observability, docs.

Skills

8+ years

Backend development

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

SQL databases

Python

Java

C++

Go

System design

AI readiness

Tools

Docker

Airflow

SQLAlchemy

OpenTelemetry

Grafana

ELK

GitLab CI

Job description

WorldQuant seeks an senior developer to design, build, and operate large-scale data and ETL systems powering research and investment workflows. You will own critical systems end-to-end, drive architectural decisions, and mentor others through review and collaboration.

Role emphasizes self-direction, accountability, and ability to communicate trade-offs across teams while maintaining code quality and production stability.