Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Architect and build resilient, high-volume data pipelines for a data platform.

• •Ladder is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own backend and data plumbing challenges, bridging transactional systems with analytical and streaming infrastructure.
• •You will architect resilient, elegant, and high-volume data pipelines.
• •Key Responsibilities Architect and build robust data pipelines between Datomic, Kafka, and BigQuery.
• •Build fault-tolerant ETL systems using frameworks like DBT to ingest and normalize messy data.
• •Evolve event-driven architecture, optimizing streaming performance for real-time models.
• •Requirements 8+ years of software or data engineering experience, with a strong academic foundation.
• •Proven track record operating at Staff or Principal level, defining technical strategy and mentoring teams.
• •Deep, production-grade experience architecting complex backend systems in Clojure and the JVM. 4+ years designing high-volume ETL/ELT pipelines at massive scale, expert in data lake layers and dbt modeling.
• •Extensive experience with cloud data warehouses (BigQuery), streaming infrastructure (Kafka), and processing frameworks (Apache Beam, Flink, or Spark).