Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform (Real-Time Systems)

$150K–$185K base + Equity

Onsite (4 days/week) — Costa Mesa, CA

U.S. Citizens or Green Card holders only

If you’ve built systems where latency, correctness, and reliability are non-negotiable, this is the kind of problem space you’ve been working toward.

This team is responsible for the real-time data platform powering live hardware systems — ingesting, processing, and serving high-frequency telemetry that directly drives physical operations.

There are no dashboards here.

There are no “eventual consistency is fine” tradeoffs.

This is core infrastructure for real-world systems — where failures have consequences and engineering quality matters.

What You’ll Actually Be Doing

• Architect and scale real-time streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, Flink)
• Build and own low-latency data pipelines processing live telemetry (sub-minute, often seconds-level)
• Design systems across the full lifecycle: ingest → process → serve
• Develop backend services on top of high-throughput distributed systems
• Drive improvements in latency, throughput, and system resilience
• Establish observability, SLAs, and reliability standards across the platform
• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks at the system level, not just patch symptoms
• Partner directly with senior leadership on architecture and long-term platform direction

Split: ~60% hands-on engineering / ~40% system design & architecture

What We’re Looking For (This Is the Bar)

• You’ve built and owned distributed systems in production at scale
• You’ve worked on real-time or near real-time data systems (not just batch/analytics)
• Strong in Python + SQL (Java/Scala/Go also valuable)
• Deep experience with Spark or comparable processing frameworks
• Hands-on with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming systems
• You understand and have operated within real tradeoffs:
• latency vs throughput
• consistency vs availability
• performance vs cost
• You’ve debugged and improved live systems under load, not just built them

What This Is NOT

• Not a BI / analytics engineering role
• Not dashboarding or reporting
• Not ML experimentation pipelines
• Not CRUD/backend API work

If your experience is primarily in those areas, this likely won’t be the right fit.

Nice to Have

• Experience with telemetry or hardware-driven data systems
• Background in high-reliability or regulated environments
• Infrastructure-as-code / platform automation experience

Why This Role

• You’re building systems that interact with the physical world, not just user clicks
• The work is operationally critical, not incremental product features
• You’ll own platform-level decisions, not just tickets
• The environment is heavily weighted toward net-new system design (~70%)
• Equity is tied to real long-term platform growth and impact

The Right Profile

This role tends to attract engineers who have worked on:

• Real-time data platforms
• Streaming/telemetry systems
• Distributed backend systems at scale

…and are looking to move into a higher-stakes, lower-latency environment.