Staff Engineer - Data Platform & Infrastructure

DRW; Chicago, New York (IL, NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401k with match

Disability insurance

Life insurance

HSA

FSA

Job summary

DRW is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Data Platform to scale DRW's data infrastructure and empower traders, researchers, and back-office teams. You will translate data strategy into engineering products and managed services, working across tooling, producers, and consumer teams to align business priorities with technical direction.

You will guide the architecture, drive the data governance strategy, and lead high-impact initiatives spanning multiple teams.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, data-intensive distributed systems, including leadership across multiple teams.
• Ability to translate data strategy into engineering products and roadmaps.
• Experience delivering managed platform services with provisioning, upgrades, reliability, and support.
• Experience with metadata management, data catalogs, or lineage systems at scale.
• Fluent in Java and/or Python with strong SQL and Linux skills.
• Strong communication skills and ability to influence across a globally distributed org.

Responsibilities

• Define and uphold the data platform vision and architecture at DRW.
• Collaborate with engineering leads, PMs, and stakeholders to translate data strategy into products and roadmaps.
• Design and operate managed platform services for storage, query execution, batch/stream processing, and orchestration.
• Lead cross-team delivery, turn requirements into practical designs with measurable outcomes.
• Drive architecture reviews, document trade-offs, and align patterns with platform goals.
• Oversee data governance strategy, including metadata, lineage, and schema evolution, with security collaboration.
• Troubleshoot distributed systems, contribute to production support, and drive improvements via automation and docs.
• Mentor engineers through reviews and hands-on collaboration.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java

Python

SQL

Linux

Data platform

Mentoring

Communication

Tools

Flink

Spark

ClickHouse

Kubernetes

Iceberg

Delta Lake

Kafka

Parquet

Job description

DRW is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Data Platform to scale DRW's data infrastructure and empower traders, researchers, and back-office teams. You will translate data strategy into engineering products and managed services, working across tooling, producers, and consumer teams to align business priorities with technical direction.

You will guide the architecture, drive the data governance strategy, and lead high-impact initiatives spanning multiple teams.