Backend Engineer - Activations

Overview

Activations Back End team processes over one hundred thousand batch jobs per day, ranging in size from gigabytes to over 100 terabytes, and powers distributions to hundreds of downstream destinations. Cumulatively, the system processes multiple exabytes per year. Detailed monitoring, error recovery, and resiliency are provided to keep this core product reliable for our largest customers.

• Lead the design and evolution of a petabyte‑scale activation platform, pushing it toward a delta‑first, cache‑aware, and cost‑efficient architecture.
• Shape end‑to‑end technical strategy for major areas of Activations Back End (e.g., matching/delta computation, job orchestration, delivery pipelines) from design through rollout and long‑term maintenance.
• Architect and build big data pipelines using Apache Spark/Dataproc, Single Store, Kubernetes/GKE, and streaming systems (e.g., Pub/Sub, Redpanda/Kafka) where appropriate.
• Use workflow engines such as Temporal and Cadence to orchestrate complex, long‑running workflows with robust retry, compensation, and observability, and define patterns other engineers can reuse.
• Design for multi‑tenant fairness and scalability, ensuring small, latency‑sensitive jobs stay fast while large backfills and bulk workflows do not starve the system via job classification, queueing, and rate‑limit–aware scheduling.
• Drive performance and cost optimization for petabyte‑scale workloads: reduce duplicate processing, improve cache hit rates, tune cluster sizing and autoscaling policies, and set and track SLOs.
• Lead production excellence: own critical services in production, coordinate incident response and postmortems, and drive structural fixes that meaningfully reduce operational load and risk.
• Infuse AI into how we build and operate: evaluate and adopt AI‑enhanced tooling (for coding, design exploration, data analysis, and operational debugging) and help define best practices.
• Mentor and level up other engineers through design/code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance, and represent Activations Back End in cross‑team architecture forums and external venues.

• Re‑architect Activations Back End to be cloud‑forward and multi‑regional, taking advantage of Single Store and other modern data warehouses to replace legacy Spark‑heavy flows where it makes sense.
• Deliver high‑throughput, low‑latency activation by combining Single Store‑backed state and delta computation, Spark/Dataproc for the heaviest batch workloads, and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Redpanda/Pub/Sub) for event‑driven and incremental deliveries.
• Build smarter orchestration and scheduling using Temporal/Cadence and queueing services to classify jobs (latency‑critical vs. throughput‑heavy vs. background), route them through multi‑queue schedulers and capacity pools, and respect destination‑specific rate limits and SLAs.
• Eliminate duplicated work through config canonicalization and caching so identical or similar jobs across customers share heavy computation.
• Collaborate closely with partner teams (Identity, Data Foundation, Activations Fullstack, Integrations/OPI) to deliver end‑to‑end improvements in activation reliability, speed, and observability, and continuously raise the bar on operational excellence.

• You are excited to adapt to major industry shifts (including the rapid evolution of AI), and approach your work with curiosity, humility, and a strong desire to keep learning.
• AI‑enabled development experience, or strong excitement to learn and grow in using AI‑enhanced development tools (e.g., code assistants, agents for log/metrics analysis, AI‑supported design and review) and help others use them effectively.
• 5+ years of experience writing and deploying high‑quality production code in a modern language (e.g., Java, Go, Scala, or similar), including owning complex systems in production.
• Have led the design and delivery of large‑scale distributed or big data systems with clear business impact (e.g., major latency/cost improvements, substantial reliability gains, or large new capabilities).
• Strong data engineering and SQL skills: comfortable modeling data, writing and optimizing…