Senior Software Engineer

About the role

Join the Data team to build and maintain the infrastructure that drives all data-related decisions at vibe. You will manage systems critical for both internal operations and external advertiser reporting, ensuring reliability and cost-efficiency as the business scales. This role offers end-to-end ownership and direct influence over the tools used by data, ML, and analytics engineers.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design and operate real-time event processing using Kafka at scale.
• Construct and manage batch orchestration pipelines with Dagster.
• Own the data serving path into ClickHouse Cloud, from ingestion to query.
• Drive projects from initial stakeholder requirements through post-launch iterations.
• Make architectural decisions regarding partitioning, materialization, retention, and compute sizing.
• Create orchestration patterns and testing frameworks for the team.
• Implement CI/CD and data contracts to reduce manual review.
• Convert one-off fixes into reusable, documented components.
• Design self-serve infrastructure that teams will adopt naturally.
• Build alerting and dashboards to proactively identify issues.
• Define SLOs that reflect actual business risks.
• Lead incident response during on-call rotations.
• Develop runbooks and automation to minimize and shorten pages.
• Anticipate scaling limitations before increased data volumes cause incidents.
• Profile and optimize services across Kafka, Spark, DuckDB, and ClickHouse.
• Manage compute and storage expenses as a primary engineering metric.
• Lead cost reviews for the platform's most expensive systems.
• Instrument the platform to detect cost regressions early.
• Translate ambiguous requests from data, ML, and product engineers into concrete tasks.
• Challenge requests that are not ready or are not the optimal approach.
• Influence upstream teams on schema, semantics, and SLAs.
• Inform senior stakeholders about tradeoffs and decisions, not implementation specifics.

Requirements

• 5+ years building and operating distributed, data-intensive systems in production.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or Rust, with disciplined testing and code review practices.
• Production experience with several of Kafka, Spark, Iceberg or object storage, ClickHouse or similar column-store analytics.
• Experience owning services from development to production, including AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code.
• A proven record of measurably improving performance or cost on specific systems, with the ability to explain the rationale.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills, including the ability to challenge stakeholders with conflicting priorities.

Nice to have

• Experience in programmatic or streaming TV advertising.

Skills & tools

• Kafka
• Dagster
• ClickHouse Cloud
• Cube
• Spark
• DuckDB
• Python
• Rust
• AWS
• Kubernetes
• Infrastructure-as-code

Practical notes

• Hybrid work model, requiring 3 days a week in the Paris office.
• Full health insurance coverage via Alan.
• Meal vouchers provided via Swile.
• Annual company offsite.
• Quarterly in-person Engineering and Product tech syncs.
• The interview process includes a recruiter screen, manager interview, take-home assignment with live debrief, and a calibration interview.
• We offer variable pay based on objectives.
• Vibe is an equal opportunity employer and accommodates reasonable requests during the application process.