Senior Backend & Data Engineer

This Is Us

Ingenious Lion is a Digital Tech Hub designed exclusively for Publicis Groupe, one of the world's leading marketing agencies.

As the marketing industry continues to drive digital transformation, Publicis Groupe empowers its clients with innovative data solutions and media ecosystems. Ingenious Lion has one mission: to partner with Publicis' global teams in creating innovative data and digital tech products that will shape the future.

What makes us successful? Two key ingredients: we seek the good and the best, meaning we cultivate a thriving company culture. We're all about creating an environment where people don't just work; they grow, challenge themselves, strive for excellence, and are recognized for their incredible value to the team.

If you're curious to learn more about us, here are four things you should know:

• Our company culture is anchored in five powerful values: Joy, Honesty, Connectivity, Own Challenger, and Greater World. Do these values resonate with you?

• We are committed to diversity and inclusion because we believe our unique differences make us stronger.

• We encourage open communication and create an environment where everyone's voice is heard and every contribution is valued.

• Finally, we're somewhat "obsessed" with quality. We believe in continuous learning and knowledge sharing; when we hit a roadblock, we don't just complain; we create solutions to overcome it.

In one sentence, we are a group of people with an unusual aptitude for generating great ideas, groundbreaking concepts, and infusing them with positive energy and good fun.

Feeling Ingenious already?

A Sneak Peek at Your Future Role

We are seeking a Senior Backend & Data Engineer to join and take hands-on ownership of backend systems and data pipelines that power some of the world's largest marketing platforms. You will write production-grade code, solve complex distributed systems and data engineering challenges, and help shape the architectural patterns the wider engineering team builds on.

You will design and evolve backend services and data pipelines end-to-end, from API design and service architecture to pipeline orchestration and data quality, while collaborating closely with product, data science, and SRE teams to ensure systems are scalable, reliable, and secure.

This role is for someone technical, curious, and comfortable driving engineering excellence through influence rather than authority, someone who raises the bar for the whole team without needing a management title to do so.

Here Are the Key Tasks You'll Be Working on Every Day

• Architect and build distributed backend services and APIs, defining patterns for scalability, resiliency, caching, queuing, and inter-service communication.

• Design, build, and optimize data pipelines, ensuring structured transformation, data quality, schema enforcement, and lineage tracking across pipeline stages.

• Design, build, and optimize data pipelines, ensuring structured transformation, data quality, and reliable delivery of marketing performance data at scale.

• Write high-quality, production-ready code; lead code reviews and mentor fellow engineers to uphold high engineering standards.

• Contribute to internal libraries, platform SDKs, and backend frameworks used across the team.

• Build and maintain deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code environments, enabling reliable, repeatable delivery across services.

• Integrate with external APIs and internal microservices, implementing secure authentication, authorization, and access controls.

• Implement observability practices and optimize services for latency, throughput, and cost efficiency.

• Contribute to automated and load testing and to resiliency practices, partnering with SRE to define and meet service-level objectives.

• Collaborate with product, data science, and SRE teams, aligning architectural decisions for consistency and maintainability across domains.

We're Thrilled to Have You Consider Joining Our Team. Here Are the Qualifications We're Seeking

• At least five years of backend engineering experience, with architectural ownership of production services or distributed systems.

• Strong Python engineering background with hands-on experience building and owning REST APIs and backend services, not limited to data or BI work.

• Solid understanding of microservices, concurrency, async programming, and event-driven architectures.

• Proven experience with AWS as the primary cloud platform, including serverless and managed services.

• Hands-on production experience with Spark and Lakehouse platforms, including the medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold), with the ability to reason about Spark runtime internals such as execution plans, shuffle behavior, and streaming semantics.

• Experience building or integrating with LLM-based or agentic systems.

• Proficiency with containerization, orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code in a cloud-native environment.

• Strong CI/CD experience and deep knowledge of observability practices: logs, metrics, traces, and performance analysis.

• Strong written and spoken English communication skills.

Skills That Would Make You Shine Even Brighter!

• You are familiar with streaming or queuing systems.

• Experience with Lakehouse governance and optimization tools.

• You have prior experience with API gateway architectures, caching layers, or service meshes.

• Fullstack engineering with product experience.