Key skills
Elasticsearch expertiseDistributed systems designMulti-tenant platform experienceJVM-based servicesCloud infrastructure (AWS)Mentoring engineersClear written communicationJavaScalaAIAWSElasticsearchLeadershipCommunicationCollaboration
About this role
Iterable is the leading AI-powered customer engagement platform that helps brands create dynamic, individualized experiences at scale. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own and evolve core Data In Flight services, with a focus on reliability, performance, and cost while leading the Elasticsearch strategy for their multi-tenant data platform.
Responsibilities:
- Own and evolve core Data In Flight services (ingestion, user and event APIs, identity, system events) with a focus on reliability, performance, and cost
- Lead the Elasticsearch strategy for our multi-tenant live user and event data: index and mapping design, shard strategy, and safeguards across shared clusters
- Design and enforce platform contracts (APIs, data models, SLAs, and usage limits) that let product teams move quickly while keeping the data platform safe and scalable
- Work across other data and application teams on initiatives such as Elasticsearch upgrades, guardrails, resharding, and event retention
- Provide senior technical leadership during incidents and reviews, turning operational learnings into durable platform improvements
- Mentor engineers on distributed systems, data modeling, and pragmatic use of Elasticsearch
Requirements:
- Hands-on Elasticsearch expertise in production: Supporting customer-facing features or platforms backed by ES
- Designing schemas and queries for high-cardinality, multi-tenant workloads
- Operating large clusters (capacity planning, scaling, incident response)
- Multi-tenant platform experience: Building shared data services used by multiple product teams
- Implementing rate limits, quotas, and noisy-neighbor protections
- Thinking in terms of contracts and SLOs, not one-off integrations
- Strong distributed systems background: JVM-based services (Scala/Java) and event-driven or streaming architectures
- Comfort with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS or similar), messaging, and caches
- Staff-level impact and collaboration: Leading cross-team projects from design through rollout
- Translating technical decisions into clear business and product trade-offs
- Clear written communication (RFCs, design docs, post-incident reviews)
- Experience with Scala and the Play framework or similar JVM stacks
- Prior work on core user data platforms (identity, profile stores, event pipelines, or CDP-like systems)
- Exposure to FinOps / infra cost optimization in data-heavy systems
- Experience in MarTech / AdTech or other high-volume, low-latency data domains