Staff Data Platform Engineer
Kargo
WorldwideremotePosted 12 days ago
Skill Required
Data-Platform-EngineerData-EngineerPlatform-EngineerData-Infrastructure-EngineerSoftware-EngineerStaff-Data-EngineerStaff-Data-EngineeringData EngineerPlatform Engineerdata engineeringData StructuresObservabilityEngineeringKubernetesSnowflakeTerraformbuildingPythondesignSparkCI/CDAPIsAWSandCICDAIFulltime
Key highlights
- AdAge Best Places to Work
Role overview
Kargo is a creative science-driven organization building powerful connections between brands and consumers through advanced AI, CTV, eCommerce, social, and mobile advertising. As a rapidly expanding company with global offices, they seek a founding engineer to lead a new Data Platform team focused on creating a unified self-serve solution for cross-platform campaigns. This role involves establishing technical standards, constructing infrastructure, and ensuring data reliability and observability across the enterprise.
Responsibilities
- Build the data control plane to centralize schemas, lineage, ownership, freshness commitments, quality metrics, and access controls for easy browsing and agent querying.
- Develop the paved road for data products by creating libraries, SDKs, templates, and data-specific CI/CD pipelines on Kargo's engineering platform, including a near-real-time pattern.
- Construct the enforcement layer for data standards using a schema registry, contract validator, and automated CI step for certification.
- Ensure every data product is observable by default by instrumenting freshness, volume, schema conformance, and quality metrics, feeding results into Kargo's existing monitoring system with metadata for AI-assisted triage.
- Define and steer the platform's technical direction, including architecture decisions, roadmaps, and build-versus-buy evaluations, while maintaining modularity for team contributions.
Requirements
- Strong AWS, Terraform, and Kubernetes experience.
- Proven experience building loosely coupled production services, APIs, and SDKs in Python that are relied upon by multiple teams.
- Experience developing metadata-driven platforms that integrate with catalogs and automatically verify lineage, contracts, and quality.
- Background in building observability systems that other teams depend on and the ability to distinguish signal from noise.
- Capacity to gain adoption of tools by teams outside your direct reporting line through architecture reviews, mentorship, and clear communication.
Nice to have
- Experience transitioning from batch processing to streaming architectures with understanding of cost tradeoffs.
- Large-scale usage of Spark and Iceberg, and production deployment of Snowflake.
- Prior experience in Ad tech or another high-volume event data domain with multiple consumers.
- Track record of building tooling and data structures designed for AI agent operation.
Additional details
- Mission: Kargo creates powerful moments of connection between brands and consumers to build businesses. Every day, our dynamic teams work to radically raise the bar on what agentic AI, CTV, eCommerce, social, and mobile can do to deliver unique ad experiences across the world’s most premium platforms. Taking a Creative Science approach to all we do, we continuously innovate solutions that outperform industry benchmarks and client expectations.
- Team Values: Techies who want to build the future. Creatives who want to design it better. Communicators to win business. Collaborators to build it. Data pros who turn numbers into insights. Product builders who turn ideas into innovations.
- Opportunity Context: Standing up a Data Platform team to solve problems once for the whole company, enabling self-serve campaigns across CTV, web, mobile apps, and social.
- Global Presence: Kargo has offices in NYC, Chicago, LA, Dallas, Sydney, Auckland, London and Waterford, Ireland.
- Recognition: AdAge Best Places to Work, ThinkLA Partner of the Year, Cynopsis 2025 Top Women in Media, Martech Breakthrough Awards – Best Overall Adtech Company, Digiday Media Awards – Best Event, Cynopsis Media Impact Awards – Best CTV Platform, Martech Breakthrough Awards – CTV Innovation, Adweek Media Plan of the Year Awards – Best Use of Insights.