Senior Data Platform Engineer - Real-Time, Petabyte Scale

SpaceX Super Intelligence; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 440,000; Full time

Job summary

SpaceXSI's Data Platform team designs and operates the infrastructure for large-scale data transport and processing across the company, including Kafka, HDFS, Spark, Flink, and Trino, enabling real-time ML pipelines and analytics at petabyte scale.

As a software engineer on this team, you will build and run distributed systems powering data movement and compute, owning infrastructure components that handle trillions of events daily and ensuring reliability under heavy load.

Qualifications

• Proven expertise in distributed systems, stream processing, or large-scale data platforms.
• Proficiency in Rust, Go, Scala or similar systems languages.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, or Hadoop in production.
• Strong debugging, profiling, and performance optimization skills.
• Track record of shipping and maintaining critical infrastructure.
• Comfortable working in fast-moving, high-stakes environments with minimal guardrails.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement high-throughput, low-latency data ingestion and transport systems.
• Scale and optimize multi-tenant Kafka infrastructure supporting real-time workloads.
• Extend and tune Spark, Flink, and Trino for demanding production pipelines.
• Build interfaces, APIs, and pipelines enabling teams to query, process, and move data at petabyte scale.
• Debug and optimize distributed systems, with a focus on reliability and performance under load.
• Collaborate with ML, product, and infrastructure teams to unblock critical data workflows.

Skills

Distributed systems

Stream processing

Kafka

Flink

Spark

Rust/Go/Scala

Tools

Hadoop

Trino

Job description

SpaceXSI's Data Platform team designs and operates the infrastructure for large-scale data transport and processing across the company, including Kafka, HDFS, Spark, Flink, and Trino, enabling real-time ML pipelines and analytics at petabyte scale.

As a software engineer on this team, you will build and run distributed systems powering data movement and compute, owning infrastructure components that handle trillions of events daily and ensuring reliability under heavy load.