Data Platform Engineer

Have you set up CDC from scratch, and do you care more about the contract than the connector? Help us build the event backbone that pay transparency runs on.

About Sysarb

Sysarb has worked on pay equity since 2005, when we set out to challenge unfair salary practices in Sweden. Today more than 700 organisations, from Swedish municipalities to global enterprises, use our platform to design compensation structures, run pay equity analysis, communicate pay to managers and employees, and report under pay transparency regulation.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive (EU 2023/970) had a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026. Member states are at very different stages, and for employers with people in several countries, that fragmentation is the actual problem. It is why demand for what we do keeps growing.

We are a Swedish company with a European market focus, operating across 70+ countries, and a founding member of the Pay Transparency Alliance.

Why this role exists

Pay transparency regulation made organisations explain pay after it was set. The next chapter is getting pay right before it is set. We call it Compensation Intelligence: helping organisations plan compensation structures, set fair pay from the start and make better pay decisions, with agentic workflows built into the platform.

Agents are only as good as the data they act on. They need to know what the data looks like now, what it looked like on a given date, and why it changed. That is what you will build: change data capture from our core database, turned into versioned domain events that become the data foundation for the whole platform, from our statistical engine to the agentic workflows on top. It is greenfield work, and you will own it. You report to our CTO.

Three things that make this role different

• Greenfield. You choose the approach together with our CTO and build it from zero. Our statistical engine is the first consumer, and the agentic workflows come next.

• Contracts, not just pipes. The events you define become the shared language of the platform.

• History is the product. In pay transparency, showing what the data looked like on a specific date is a core requirement, not a nice to have.

What you will do

• Build the CDC pipeline and run it in production, including replays, backfills, monitoring and alerting

• Turn row-level changes into business events, such as "salary changed for employee X, effective from date Y", together with our CTO

• Own schemas and contracts: a schema registry, versioning and compatibility rules

• Work with our data scientists so pay equity analysis runs on clean, versioned data

• Make the pipeline something the whole team can operate and build on

What success looks like

Within your first year, the event stream is how new services get data from the core, our statistical engine runs on versioned events, we can show what the data looked like on any given date, and the event stream is the data our agentic workflows are built on. We will walk you through the 3, 6 and 12-month goals in the interview.

We are looking for someone who

This is a senior streaming or platform role, not a classic data engineering role. If your strength is mainly warehouses, dbt and dashboards, this is probably not the right fit, and we'd rather say so up front.

• Has run Kafka (or an equivalent event platform) in production

• Has hands-on experience with both stream processing and batch processing. Some of our calculations need to run in real time as data changes, others as bulk transformations, and you know which is which

• Has set up CDC from scratch, ideally on SQL Server

• Models events around the business, not around the tables they come from

• Has handled schema evolution in practice, and knows what breaks consumers

• Has run pipelines on call, and builds monitoring you trust at 3 a.m.

• Raises the bar. You will define contracts the whole platform depends on, so you bring that judgement rather than learn it here

• Works well with data scientists and can argue event design with a CTO

• Communicates clearly in English. Swedish is an advantage

An advantage, not a requirement

• Experience with Debezium, Kafka Connect or SQL Server's native change tracking

• Experience with multi-tenant data platforms

• Bitemporal or event-sourced data models

• Experience in HR, finance, compliance or other regulated domains

• Experience with Node.js or Python, which most of our platform runs on. Familiarity with C# helps, since parts of the platform are built in it

What is not in this role

Not in scope for the first year: a data warehouse, BI dashboards or reporting for internal teams. Those can follow once the event stream exists. You will not build the AI agents themselves either. You build the data they run on, and work closely with the team that builds them. If you want to build the foundation first and do it properly, that is exactly the point.

How would you design it?

This is the most important part of our process. We will give you a real case from our domain: a salary changes in the core database, with an effective date in the past. Walk us through how that becomes a domain event, how it is versioned, and what a consumer sees. There is no single right answer. We are interested in how you reason about contracts, history and failure.

You will meet our CTO and members of the tech team.

What we offer

• Occupational pension (ITP) in line with our collective agreement, with the option of salary exchange

• Wellness allowance of up to 5,000 SEK per year

• Full time is 40 hours per week, with a hybrid setup out of our offices in Arboga and Stockholm. Our product and tech teams are mainly based in Arboga, and you can work from either office

• A product with a real purpose: our vision is to create fair employers worldwide

Our commitment to inclusion and a fair process

Sysarb is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to create an inclusive environment for all employees and candidates. Please refrain from including your picture and age with your application. We occasionally use assessments as part of our recruitment process, and we perform background checks on every candidate who qualifies for the final step of our recruitment process.

In your application, tell us about one pipeline you built and what broke first. A few lines is enough.

We review applications on a rolling basis and will hire as soon as we find the right match. Please note that we do not accept any job applications via e-mail due to GDPR regulations.