Senior Backend Engineer, Customer Data Platform
Summary
Builds and maintains high-performance event pipelines, Elasticsearch search layers, and Kafka integrations to handle customer data at scale, ensuring reliability under load spikes and cross-team coordination.
- Deliver through Claude Code and improve context, agent tooling, and evaluation of agent output
- Own event-pipeline services under load spikes and pathological traffic, including backpressure, load shedding, circuit breakers, retries, and dead lettering
- Own the Elasticsearch query and search layer, including deep pagination and behavior under memory and rate limits
- Own sandboxed execution of customer logic and integrations with Piano products and third-party systems
- Drive integration work across team boundaries and coordinate cross-service rollouts
- Scope epics and technical trade-offs with technical, product, and business counterparts
- Create decision records for other teams to build against
- Review teammates' work with depth scaled to risk and test determinism
- Run production changes end to end through Helm and FluxCD GitOps
- Participate in on-duty rotation covering alerts, P1/P2 triage, hotfixes, and root-cause communication to enterprise customers
Requirements
- Daily, fluent Claude Code practice on production code
- Strong Node.js and TypeScript, including ESM, strict tsconfig, and Jest/Mocha
- Deep Elasticsearch 8.x knowledge, including mappings, reindexing, sort and range semantics, deep pagination, and backpressure
- Kafka-at-scale experience, including partitioning, consumer concurrency and lag, dead-letter handling, and topic lifecycle
- Production ownership experience with on-call, evidence-backed root cause analysis, Datadog instrumentation, toggle-gated rollouts, and profiling-driven performance work
- PostgreSQL experience with an ORM, including migrations, indexing, and transaction semantics
- Willingness to own Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, and GitLab CI
- Experience with dependency and CVE triage
- Clear technical English
- Ability to hold a technical position with product and business stakeholders
- Nice-to-have: MCP servers, agent skills, V8 isolates, ClickHouse, Aerospike, ArangoDB, Redis, gRPC, Testcontainers, WireMock, Rush, pnpm workspaces, high-volume multi-tenant data platforms, and maintenance-level Java
Core Competencies
Demonstrates expertise in Node.js and TypeScript development, with a strong focus on Elasticsearch and Kafka for high-performance data handling. Proven ability to manage production environments, coordinate cross-team integrations, and communicate effectively with technical and business stakeholders.
Highest-signal resume keywords
- Node.js Development
- TypeScript Proficiency
- Elasticsearch 8.x Expertise
- Kafka-at-Scale Experience
- Production Ownership
ATS Optimization Keywords
Hard Skills
- Claude Code Practice
- PostgreSQL with ORM
- Kubernetes Management
- GitOps with Helm
- Datadog Instrumentation
- Dependency and CVE Triage
- Backpressure Management
- Transaction Semantics
- Reindexing
- Consumer Concurrency
Soft Skills
- Clear Technical English
- Cross-Team Collaboration
- Stakeholder Communication
Industry Keywords
- Event-Pipeline Services
- Load Shedding
- Dead Lettering
- High-Volume Multi-Tenant Data Platforms
- Toggle-Gated Rollouts
Tools & Technologies
- Helm
- GitLab CI
- FluxCD
- Jest
- Mocha