Senior Data Engineer - Real Time Streams

About this role

You will be a senior engineer on the team that owns the real-time data platform. The platform turns operational events (orders, driver locations, geofence transitions, shifts, MQTT session events) into live analytics, routing inputs, and warehoused data across Postgres/TimescaleDB, ClickHouse, and BigQuery. You will own the platform end-to-end: design, implementation, deployment, and production operation of the streaming jobs, CDC pipelines, Kafka Connect bridges, and downstream sinks that move this data. Responsibilities - Designing, implementing, and operating stateful Apache Flink streaming pipelines: keyed state, windowing, watermarks, timers, side outputs, custom sources/sinks. - Designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines using Flink CDC or Debezium, moving operational database changes into the streaming platform with correct snapshot/incremental handling, schema evolution, and downstream idempotency. - Building and operating Kafka and Kafka Connect pipelines: topic and partition design, source/sink connectors in distributed mode, schema and converter management, and deadletter routing. - Owning the path from Kafka → Flink → Postgres / TimescaleDB / ClickHouse / BigQuery, including schema design, idempotency strategy, batch tuning, and observability. - Diagnosing and fixing production issues: checkpoint failures, backpressure, state growth, sink slowness, autoscaler oscillation, restart loops. - Hardening the platform: delivery guarantees, watermarks, DLQ handling, schema migrations, alerting coverage. * Code reviews and mentoring mid-level engineers. - Contributing to the deployment side: Helm charts, ArgoCD applications, GKE configuration, Grafana dashboards, Prometheus alert rules. - Influencing direction: state backend choices, schema migrations, when a pipeline needs to be split or rebuilt. Requirements - 5+ years of professional software/data engineering experience, with strong Java expertise. - Production experience with Apache Flink and stateful real-time streaming pipelines. - Strong Apache Kafka experience, including Kafka Connect, consumer groups, partitions, delivery guarantees, and schema management. - Hands-on CDC experience using Debezium or Flink CDC. - Experience designing and operating Kafka → Flink → database/data warehouse pipelines in production. - Strong understanding of PostgreSQL and experience with at least one analytical database such as ClickHouse or BigQuery. - Experience with Kubernetes and deploying/operating production data workloads. - Proven ability to troubleshoot and optimize production streaming systems—backpressure, checkpoint failures, state growth, latency, lag, and sink performance. - Strong understanding of data consistency, idempotency, schema evolution, and observability. - Ability to work independently and own a data platform component end-to-end, from design through production operation. Will be a plus - Experience with TimescaleDB, hypertables, and time-series data. - Experience with PostGIS and geospatial/spatial query optimization. - Deep ClickHouse performance tuning, including MergeTree and partitioning strategies. - Strong BigQuery optimization and data modeling experience. - Experience with Flink Kubernetes Operator and Flink autoscaler tuning. - Experience with ArgoCD, Helm, GKE, Prometheus, and Grafana. - Experience designing high-throughput, low-latency real-time systems at scale. - Experience with MQTT or IoT/event-driven systems. - Knowledge of Kafka Schema Registry, Avro/Protobuf, and advanced schema evolution. - Experience mentoring engineers and leading technical decisions around streaming architecture. - Experience with routing, logistics, delivery, mobility, or location-based platforms would be particularly relevant. What we offer - 20 days of paid vacation, 5 sick days, and public holidays. - Flexible schedule with a high level of autonomy. - Opportunity to influence product and technical decisions. - Professional growth and learning opportunities. - Comfortable working environment with a supportive team.