Key skills
ClojureMachine LearningETLELTData EngineeringBigQuerySparkKafkadbt
About this role
Ladder is a company focused on revolutionizing the life insurance industry by streamlining the coverage process. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to architect and build robust data pipelines, ensuring efficient data flow and integration between various systems while supporting the company's data strategy.
Responsibilities:
- Architect and Build: Design, deploy, and scale robust data pipelines that reliably move and transform data between Datomic, Kafka, and BigQuery
- Tame the Chaos: Build elegant, fault-tolerant ETL systems leveraging frameworks like DBT to ingest, sanitize, and normalize messy, unstructured data from dozens of third-party APIs and legacy vendors
- Master the Stream: Evolve our event-driven architecture, optimizing streaming performance (Kafka/BEAM) to support real-time machine learning models
- Drive Technical Excellence: Act as a force multiplier for the engineering team. You'll set standards for backend architecture in Clojure, mentor peers, and make high-stakes technical decisions that scale with our rapid growth
- Bridge the Gap: Partner closely with Data Science, Product and Business Development teams to ensure our data infrastructure proactively serves the evolving needs of the business
Requirements:
- 8+ years of rigorous software or data engineering experience
- Strong academic foundation (BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field)
- Proven track record operating at a Staff or Principal level
- Deep, production-grade experience natively architecting complex backend systems in Clojure and the JVM
- 4+ battle-tested years designing high-volume ETL/ELT pipelines at massive scale
- Expert at structuring data lakes through Raw/Bronze, Cleansed/Silver, and Curated/Gold layers
- Extensive, hands-on experience operating cloud data warehouses (specifically BigQuery)
- Experience with streaming infrastructure (Kafka)
- Experience with processing frameworks (Apache Beam, Flink, or Spark)
- Ability to wrangle messy, unstructured third-party API data into clean, ready-to-query models
- Understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architectures