Staff Engineer — Data Platform

Taboola; United States; Hybrid; USD 137,000 - 213,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work schedule

Competitive benefits

Well-being programs

Job summary

Taboola is seeking a Staff Engineer - Data Platform in the Infrastructure Department, Tel Aviv. You will lead the core data platform powering reporting, billing, ML training, experimentation, and revenue optimization, ensuring data is reliable, fresh, scalable, and easy to use.

You will own the hardest technical challenges across Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, and StarRocks, mentoring engineers and driving technical excellence across the team.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.
• Expertise in Java or an equivalent JVM language.
• Deep knowledge of Apache Spark internals and performance tuning at scale.
• Production experience with Iceberg or similar table formats.
• In-depth Kafka internals and high-throughput pipelines.
• Experience with StarRocks or similar analytics engine.
• Mentoring engineers and growing technical leaders.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical direction of the Data Platform group and roadmap.
• Mentor engineers and lead design reviews and code reviews.
• Raise engineering standards for design, testing, observability, and reliability.
• Own the hardest problems across Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, and StarRocks.
• Evolve the Spark SQL platform and core framework used across R&D.
• Drive lakehouse evolution with Iceberg as backbone from ingestion to serving.
• Be the go-to expert for production health of the data pipeline.
• Collaborate with algo, product, finance, and infra stakeholders to align on platform evolution.
• Stay hands-on with production code and prototypes.
• Represent the group in architecture forums, hiring, and conferences.

Skills

Java

Spark

Iceberg

Kafka

StarRocks

Linux

Kubernetes

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Code reviews

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science

Tools

Spark

Iceberg

Kafka

StarRocks

Job description

Realize your potential by joining the leading performance-driven advertising company!

As a Staff Engineer - Data Platform on the infrastructure department in our Tel Aviv Office, you’ll play a vital role in as a Staff Engineer – Data Platform in the Infrastructure Department in our Tel Aviv office, you’ll play a vital role in building the core data platform that powers Taboola’s reporting, billing, ML training, experimentation, revenue optimization, and business decision-making — ensuring data is reliable, fresh, scalable, and easy to use.

You’ll be a senior technical leader across the Data Platform group, owning the hardest technical challenges across Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, and StarRocks. As a hands-on individual contributor, you’ll drive technical excellence and make every engineer around you better through mentoring and technical leadership.

1.4 billion users. 950,000 requests per second. 150TB of fresh data every day. 800M metrics every minute. That's the scale Taboola's Data Platform group operates at.

To thrive in this role, you'll need:

• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering, with deep expertise in Java or an equivalent JVM/object-oriented language


• Deep, hands-on expertise in Apache Spark — internals, Spark SQL and the Catalyst optimizer, and performance and cost tuning at scale


• Production experience with Apache Iceberg (or another open table format such as Delta Lake or Hudi) — table design, partitioning, compaction, and metadata/catalog management


• Deep expertise in Apache Kafka — internals, partitioning and delivery semantics, and operating high-throughput pipelines in production


• Hands-on experience with StarRocks or a similar MPP/real-time analytics engine (Druid, ClickHouse, Trino)


• Lead by example with AI: introduce agent-based engineering workflows, measure their impact, and help the group adopt them


• A track record of designing, building, and owning large-scale distributed data systems end to end — from architecture to production reliability


• Proven experience mentoring engineers and growing technical leaders — through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing


• Ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across teams, managers, and stakeholders


• Highly proficient with Linux and Kubernetes in production


• B.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Bonus points if you have:

• Contributions to open-source data projects (Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, StarRocks, or similar)


• Conference talks, blog posts, or other public technical writing


• Experience running Spark on GPU (RAPIDS) or other query acceleration techniques


• Experience with stream processing (Spark Structured Streaming, Kafka Streams, Flink)


• Experience with dbt and/or Airflow


• Knowledge of Ansible, Puppet, or similar configuration systems


• A track record of leveraging AI agents to accelerate engineering work


• Familiarity with how ML training pipelines consume data, to partner effectively with algo teams

How you’ll make an impact:

• Shape the technical direction of the Data Platform group — the architecture, the long-term roadmap, and the bets we make on emerging tech (Iceberg, StarRocks, GPU Spark, dbt, AI tooling)


• Mentor and grow engineers across the group: lead design reviews, pair on hard problems, review code with care, and help strong engineers grow into technical leaders


• Raise the engineering bar group-wide — set standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational excellence


• Own the hardest problems on our stack: Spark performance and cost across 60,000+ jobs/day, Iceberg table management at Taboola scale, high-throughput Kafka ingestion, and low-latency analytics on StarRocks


• Evolve our Spark SQL platform and the core framework code used across R&D — making the call on what gets built, refactored, or retired


• Drive the evolution of our lakehouse, with Iceberg as the backbone — from ingestion through storage, compaction, and serving


• Be the go-to expert for the production health of the main Taboola data pipeline — the system behind reports, ML model training, billing, and other business-critical processes — and lead deep-dives and postmortems on the toughest incidents


• Partner with team leaders, group managers, and fellow principal engineers to shape how the platform evolves across R&D, balancing the needs of algo, product, finance, and infrastructure stakeholders


• Stay deeply hands-on — write production code, build prototypes, and prove out new technology before the group commits to it


• Represent the group internally and externally — in architecture forums, hiring, open-source communities, and conference talks


• Directly shape how billions of people discover the internet

Here are some of the things engineers in our group have done — or are doing right now

• Pioneered deployment of Spark SQL workloads on GPU with RAPIDS


• Delivered a real-time pipeline reports product serving all our customers on top of Druid


• Actively migrating a proprietary ETL system to dbt-core


• Pioneered usage of Iceberg (and gave conference talks about it) — yes, we manage it ourselves


• Productionizing our StarRocks deployments


• Building pipelines on top of Spark Streaming, Iceberg, and dbt


• Extending data solutions to help algo engineers iterate faster


• Our Tech Stack

Java, Spark, Kafka, Iceberg, Hadoop, Cassandra, Vertica, StarRocks, MySQL, HDFS, BigQuery, Docker, Linux, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, Airflow, dbt, Druid

Why Taboola?

If you ask Taboolars what they love about working here, they’ll tell you that they’ve been empowered to realize their full potential while growing and learning from and with smart and talented people. They’ll also share more about:

• Adam Singolda, Taboola Founder and CEO says; “You can copy anything from another business but you can’t copy a company’s culture.”


• Well-being: Competitive benefits and well-being programs tailored to the region, including comprehensive health benefits, a fully stocked kitchen, and location-specific perks.


• Flexibility: We offer a hybrid work schedule with 3 days in-office with an option to come in more often if desired.


• Work with some of the biggest names: Our publisher partners include Yahoo, Conde Nast, Fox Sports, NBCU, ESPN, CBS, and E! Online. Our advertiser clients include Wells Fargo, Honda, Pinterest, and Expedia.

Ready to realize your potential?

Taboola is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity in all forms. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and believe such an environment is critical for success. Employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.

Learn more about #TaboolaLife on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, & the Taboola Life Blog.

About Taboola

Taboola empowers businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that goes beyond search and social and delivers measurable outcomes at scale.

Taboola works with thousands of businesses who advertise directly on Realize, Taboola’s powerful ad platform, reaching approximately 600M daily active users across some of the best publishers in the world. Publishers like NBC News, Yahoo, and OEMs such as Samsung, Xiaomi and others use Taboola’s technology to grow audience and revenue, enabling Realize to offer unique data, specialized algorithms, and unmatched scale.

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