Senior Data Engineer

Job Title:

Senior Data Engineer

Who we are:

Adaptiq is a technology hub specializing in building, scaling, and supporting R&D teams for high-end, fast-growing product companies in a wide range of industries.

About the Product:

The product brings together data about employees, devices, applications, and IT operations to help organizations understand and improve the digital workplace experience. It combines information from multiple systems into a consolidated view, enabling IT teams to identify issues, analyze trends, and take action.

Its underlying platform ingests continuously changing data, normalizes it, and maintains relationships between employees, departments, devices, and organizational structures. Role-based access controls govern how that information is used. The engineering challenge is to make high-volume data flows reliable and efficient while providing low-latency access to current information.

About the Role:

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will build the streaming pipelines and distributed services that support this platform. This is a hands-on role centered on Java, Kafka, and Apache Flink. You will work from product requirements and architectural direction while owning complex implementation decisions, identifying risks early, and delivering production-ready components with minimal supervision.

You will join a small team developing the product and work with architecture, product, and DevOps colleagues. Early work includes understanding existing schemas and data sources, planning how data enters the platform, defining transformations and aggregations, and implementing, testing, and deploying those flows. The role involves substantial work on throughput, latency, persistence, reliability, and the operational behavior of systems processing data at scale.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain production Java services and high-throughput data-processing components.
• Design, implement, and optimize Kafka and Apache Flink pipelines that combine data from multiple sources.
• Plan and implement data flows, including ingestion, normalization, calculation, aggregation, and persistence.
• Develop the data model and services for employees, departments, devices, organizational relationships, and role-based access control.
• Build service interfaces and data contracts using technologies such as gRPC and Protobuf.
• Design persistence and data-access patterns across relational, analytical, and in-memory systems, including PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and Redis where appropriate.
• Optimize schemas, queries, indexes, partitioning, and ingestion for large datasets.
• Diagnose bottlenecks and production incidents across streaming pipelines, services, and databases.
• Improve scalability, reliability, observability, throughput, latency, and operational cost.
• Use AI-assisted development tools while independently reviewing their output for correctness, security, and maintainability.

Required Competence and Skills:

• Typically 10+ years of experience building and maintaining production systems, including substantial hands-on work with distributed, high-throughput data platforms.
• Typically 5+ years of professional Java experience, with a strong grasp of concurrency, memory management, and JVM performance tuning.
• Typically 3+ years of production Kafka experience, including partitioning, consumer groups, schemas, delivery guarantees, fault tolerance, and throughput tuning.
• Typically 2+ years of production Apache Flink experience, including stateful processing, windowing, checkpointing, backpressure, fault recovery, and pipeline optimization.
• Experience building and operating systems that process millions of events per minute, with direct ownership of scaling or production performance decisions.
• Strong data-modeling and database optimization skills, including work with time-series data, high-volume ingestion, analytical workloads, and PostgreSQL or another relational database.
• Experience with Protobuf, schema evolution, and compatibility in distributed systems; familiarity with gRPC and service-to-service communication.
• Hands-on experience monitoring, troubleshooting, and improving distributed production workloads, including incident resolution and resource management.
• Practical use of AI-assisted or agentic coding tools, paired with critical review of generated code before production use.
• Ability to own complex components independently, assess technical tradeoffs, and deliver maintainable solutions.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with ClickHouse or a comparable large-scale analytical database.
• Practical familiarity with CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, and production observability.
• Experience with TypeScript and React, including backend services or user-facing applications.
• Experience unifying data from multiple sources in Kafka-based pipelines.
• Experience with real-time analytics, anomaly detection, or complex event processing.
• Experience integrating AI or LLM-based capabilities, agentic workflows, or tool-based automation into production systems.

Why Us:

We provide 20 days of vacation leave per calendar year (plus official national holidays of a country you are based in).

We provide full accounting and legal support in all countries we operate.

We utilize a fully remote work model with a powerful workstation and co-working space in case you need it.