Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform (Real-Time Systems)$150K–$185K base + EquityOnsite (4 days/week) — Costa Mesa, CAU.S. Citizens or Green Card holders onlyIf you’ve built systems where latency, correctness, and reliability are non-negotiable, this is the kind of problem space you’ve been working toward.This team is responsible for the real-time data platform powering live hardware systems — ingesting, processing, and serving high-frequency telemetry that directly drives physical operations.There are no dashboards here. There are no “eventual consistency is fine” tradeoffs.This is core infrastructure for real-world systems — where failures have consequences and engineering quality matters.What You’ll Actually Be DoingArchitect and scale real-time streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, Flink)Build and own low-latency data pipelines processing live telemetry (sub-minute, often seconds-level)Design systems across the full lifecycle: ingest → process →serveDevelop backend services on top of high-throughput distributed systemsDrive improvements in latency, throughput, and system resilienceEstablish observability, SLAs, and reliability standards across the platformIdentify and eliminate bottlenecks at the system level, not just patch symptomsPartner directly with senior leadership on architecture and long-term platform directionSplit: ~60% hands-on engineering / ~40% system design & architectureWhat We’re Looking For (This Is the Bar)You’ve built and owned distributed systems in production at scaleYou’ve worked on real-time or near real-time data systems (not just batch/analytics)Strong in Python + SQL (Java/Scala/Go also valuable)Deep experience with Spark or comparable processing frameworksHands-on with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming systemsYou understand and have operated within real tradeoffs: latency vs through put consistency vs availability performance vs costYou’ve debugged and improved live systems under load, not just built themWhat This Is NOTNot a BI / analytics engineering roleNot dashboarding or reportingNot ML experimentation pipelinesNot CRUD/backendAPI workIf your experience is primarily in those areas, this likely won’t be the rightNice to HaveExperience with telemetry or hardware-driven data systemsBackground in high-reliability or regulated environmentsInfrastructure-as-code / platform automation experienceWhy This RoleYou’re building systems that interact with the physical world, not just user clicksThe work is operationally critical, not incremental product featuresYou’ll own platform-level decisions, not just ticketsThe environment is heavily weighted toward net-new system design (~70%)Equity is tied to real long-term platform growth and impactThe Right ProfileThis role tends to attract engineers who have worked on:Real-time data platformsStreaming/telemetry systemsDistributed backend systems at scale