Senior Software Engineer

Mheducation; Ohio; On-site; USD 124,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

McGraw Hill is seeking a Senior Software Engineer focused on Databricks data engineering to build scalable pipelines and analytics for Open Learning. You will own data models and reporting layers used by educators, with collaboration across backend, UI, product, and data platform teams.

Responsibilities include designing dimensional models, optimizing Spark/SQL, governance via Unity Catalog, and mentoring others. Strong AWS, Databricks, and Delta Lake expertise are required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years software or data engineering experience, including production data pipelines on Databricks or Spark in AWS.
• Strong SQL skills with performance tuning for large datasets.
• Experience delivering production-grade software in a distributed environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field.

Responsibilities

• Own data pipelines and analytics models in Databricks lakehouse powering reports.
• Translate business requirements into designs and partner with product teams.
• Build and maintain scalable batch and incremental data pipelines using PySpark and Delta Lake.
• Design reporting data models using dimensional modeling and bronze/silver/gold architecture.
• Tune Spark/SQL performance and manage compute costs.
• Ensure data quality, observability, and reliability via automation and monitoring.
• Apply data governance through Unity Catalog and lead design reviews.
• Mentor engineers on data engineering best practices.

Skills

PySpark

SQL

Data pipelines

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

REST APIs

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Tools

Databricks

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

Spark SQL

Job description

Senior Software Engineer (Databricks)

Overview

Build the future!

McGraw Hill is a learning science company that delivers personalized learning experiences to help students, parents, educators, and professionals drive results. We are hiring a Senior Engineer to join our Insights and Personalization Engineering team and build reporting and personalization features at scale on our Open Learning platform. This role focuses on data engineering in Databricks for Symphony, the platform behind teacher- and administrator-facing reports for products such as PRoPL, OpenLearning, and MHPlus.

How are you creating an impact?

You will own the data pipelines and analytics models in our Databricks lakehouse that power reports used by millions of users, from ingestion through to the serving layer consumed by our reporting APIs and UIs. Working closely with backend, UI, product, and data platform teams, you will help shape how McGraw Hill delivers insights to educators.

What will you be doing?

• Translate business requirements into technical specifications and solution designs, partnering with product and engineering leaders
• Build and maintain scalable batch and incremental data pipelines using PySpark, Spark SQL, Delta Lake, and Databricks Workflows
• Design reporting data models using dimensional modeling and medallion (bronze/silver/gold) architecture
• Build and optimize the SQL serving layer in Unity Catalog, including views, materialized views, and table-valued functions
• Tune Spark and SQL performance and manage compute cost
• Own data quality, observability, and reliability through automation, testing, and monitoring
• Apply data governance and access controls through Unity Catalog
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers on data engineering best practices

Our stack includes

• Languages: Go (APIs/services), Python/PySpark, Spark SQL, Scala (data pipelines)
• Databricks: Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, PySpark/Spark SQL, Databricks SQL warehouses, Workflows/Jobs, notebooks, materialized views, SQL table-valued functions
• AWS and data stores: S3, RDS, Kafka, Aurora (PostgreSQL)
• Platform and DevOps: GitHub, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, EKS, Terraform
• Collaboration: Jira, Confluence, Slack

We are looking for someone having:

• 5+ years of software or data engineering experience, including 3+ years building production data pipelines on Databricks or an equivalent Spark platform in AWS
• Experience delivering production-grade, fault-tolerant software in a fast-paced environment with a distributed team
• Advanced SQL skills, including tuning complex analytical queries over large datasets
• Expertise in data warehousing, lakehouse concepts, data modeling, and cloud data architecture
• Strong applied knowledge of several of: Unity Catalog governance, batch and incremental ETL/ELT, Spark performance tuning, REST services, AWS data services (Athena, Glue, EMR, Lambda), Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Git
• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience

Nice to have:

• Education or publishing domain experience
• Streaming/CDC ingestion (e.g., Kafka) into Delta Lake
• Data quality frameworks (Delta Live Tables, Great Expectations)
• Databricks certification

Why work for us?
The work you do at McGraw Hill will be work that matters. We are collectively designing content that will build the future of education. Play your part and experience a sense of fulfilment that will inspire you to even greater heights.

The pay range for this position is between $124,300 - $160,000 annually. However, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. Additionally, a full range of medical and/or other benefits may be provided, depending on the position offered. Click here to learn more about our benefit offerings.