Platform Engineer - Data (SDE-3 / Staff)

This role is for one of Weekday’s clients Min Experience: 7+ years Location: India JobType: full-time We are looking for a hands-on Platform Engineer – Data (SDE-3 / Staff) to take ownership of a large-scale, billion-row shared data platform and help scale it from its current state to the next level of reliability, performance, and usability. This is a data platform engineering role , not a business ETL or analytics-pipeline delivery position. You will design, build, and operate the foundational systems that product and engineering teams rely on. The role requires strong distributed-systems expertise, production engineering skills, and the ability to drive architecture while remaining deeply involved in coding and operations. What You’ll Own Build and evolve open-lakehouse foundations using technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Apache Hudi, including table lifecycle management, partitioning, data layout, compaction, schema evolution, catalog management, and query operations. Design and operate batch and streaming ingestion systems , including CDC, data contracts, deduplication, checkpointing, replay, recovery, and failure handling. Develop platform services, APIs, and self-service capabilities that enable engineering and product teams to consume and manage data independently without creating unnecessary dependencies on a central platform team. Build and manage orchestration and workload execution systems across Kubernetes and workflow technologies such as Prefect, Argo, or Airflow. Establish robust metadata, lineage, governance, data quality, and observability capabilities across the platform. Own production reliability and operational excellence , including incident response, SLAs, data freshness, performance and cost optimization, capacity planning, and recovery improvements. Establish engineering standards and architectural patterns that enable the platform to scale across teams and workloads. What We’re Looking For Typically 7+ years of software or platform engineering experience , with demonstrated SDE-3 / Staff-level ownership and impact, regardless of current job title. Proven, hands-on experience owning a shared data platform in production , rather than exclusively building pipelines or applications on top of an existing platform. Strong expertise in distributed-systems design and production-grade software development using one or more of Python, Java, Go, or Scala. Meaningful experience across batch processing, streaming, data ingestion/CDC, storage and query systems, and platform operations . Demonstrated ability to improve reliability, scalability, performance, cost efficiency, or developer self-service in large-scale production environments. Strong individual contributor who can influence architecture, establish technical standards, and drive complex engineering initiatives while remaining close to the code and operational details. Comfortable taking end-to-end ownership, from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, incident response, and continuous improvement. Strong Adjacent Experience Experience with open-source or production-scale implementations involving: Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi, or Delta Lake Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or Debezium Apache Spark, Trino, or Pinot Kubernetes and cloud-native workload platforms Data catalogs, metadata platforms, lineage systems, or governance frameworks Data quality and observability platforms Not a Fit For This Role This role is not intended for candidates whose experience is primarily focused on: BI or reporting Analytics engineering Data warehouse modeling Business-facing ETL development only Generic backend engineering without significant data-platform ownership Assembly and configuration of managed services without deep platform engineering ownership Narrow ownership of a single infrastructure or data component People-management-focused roles without substantial hands-on engineering involvement Must-Have Skills Data Platform Distributed Systems Good-to-Have Skills Apache Iceberg Apache Hudi Delta Lake Role Level SDE-3 / Staff Engineer Experience: Typically 7+ years