Staff II Software Engineer, Data Ingestion

About the Team:

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer I/II to join our Data Ingestion Team, which builds and operates the critical infrastructure that serves as the “front door” of StackAdapt’s event flow. In this role, you’ll own technical direction for critical parts of our ingestion platform, lead large-scale initiatives, and shape how data flows across the company.

The Data Ingestion team tackles complex distributed systems challenges at massive scale, with a focus on scalability, performance, and reliability. Our systems process over 10 billion events per day, powering core functions across bidding, reporting, billing, analytics, and machine learning. You will work on challenging technical problems and partner with teams across the company to drive key initiatives.

We design + build low-latency, highly reliable distributed systems for impressions, clicks, conversions, and third-party signals, ensuring data is accurate and available to downstream teams in real time. This is a high-impact area at the core of StackAdapt’s platform, the systems you own will directly shape data quality, system reliability, and the speed at which teams across the company can build and innovate. Our work sits at the cutting edge of large-scale distributed systems, leveraging modern technologies and architectures to solve complex real-time data challenges. The core stack includes Golang, Kafka, TiDB, Aerospike, Vitess, Kubernetes, and more.

If you enjoy solving complex distributed systems problems at scale and driving technical impact across teams, this role would be a great fit for you.

StackAdapt is a Remote First company. We are open to candidates located anywhere in Canada or the United States for this position.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Own and lead large technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through production and monitoring
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across the team
• Design, build, and operate highly scalable, distributed ingestion services for real-time and near-real-time scenarios
• Contribute hands-on as needed while enabling the team to execute effectively
• Build and maintain event ingestion pipelines using streaming technologies like Kafka
• Work with high-volume storage systems and databases to persist and serve data efficiently
• Partner with Data, ML, Product, and Platform teams to support evolving requirements
• Improve code quality, testing practices, system reliability, and observability
• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions
• Balance and prioritize projects to maximize impact and align with company objectives

What You’ll Bring to the Table:

• Extensive experience building distributed systems and high-throughput backend services
• Proven ability to lead technical direction and drive large, cross-team initiatives
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills, with comfort working in ambiguous, complex domains
• Collaborative mindset with the ability to influence across teams
• Ability to think strategically, lead technically, and drive high-impact, scalable solutions
• Hands-on experience with streaming systems (Kafka or similar)
• Strong understanding of distributed systems trade-offs (consistency, availability, partition tolerance, scalability)
• Maintains an AI-forward approach to software engineering - leveraging AI to boost productivity, collaboration, and business automation
• Bonus: Familiarity with AdTech, event-driven architectures, or analytics systems

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