Cognitiv

Cognitiv

Staff Software Engineer, Big Data

Vancouver, BC · Staff+

Sponsorship not specified$170k-$240kDetected 27 days ago
PythonJavaDistributed SystemsAWSAzureCloud PlatformsKafkaMachine LearningDeep LearningSparkData EngineeringData ScienceSignal ProcessingEHR/EMRLeadershipMentoring

About the role

  • in-office Monday-Wednesday, with remote flexibility on Thursday and Friday.
  • In this role, success is measured by the durability of your technical solutions, the health of the data platform, and your influence across the engineering organization.

Responsibilities

  • Lead Platform Architecture: Define and evolve the architecture of Cognitiv's large-scale data platform, ensuring ingestion, storage, processing, and serving systems can scale to support future business growth, AI initiatives, and increasing data volumes.
  • Shape Long-Term Technical Direction: Evaluate architectural tradeoffs with a 3-5 year horizon, establish technical standards and paved-road solutions, and drive modernization efforts that improve scalability, reliability, developer productivity, and operational efficiency.
  • Elevate Reliability and Operational Excellence: Lead architecture reviews, failure-mode analysis, and incident retrospectives. Establish mechanisms to proactively identify, prioritize, and reduce technical risk across critical data systems.
  • Own Cost and Efficiency at Scale: Treat cost as a first-class architectural dimension for a multi-petabyte data platform.
  • Lead cost vs. performance tradeoff decisions across storage tiering, compute, file layout, and data movement, and build the visibility and guardrails that let teams reason about unit economics when they design systems.
  • Grow Engineering Talent: Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders. Raise engineering standards through design reviews, architectural guidance, technical artifacts, and thoughtful coaching.
  • Define and evolve the architecture of Cognitiv's large-scale data platform, ensuring ingestion, storage, processing, and serving systems can scale to support future business growth, AI initiatives, and increasing data volumes.
  • Align stakeholders, reduce execution risk, and deliver outcomes that improve platform capabilities across the organization.
  • Evaluate architectural tradeoffs with a 3-5 year horizon, establish technical standards and paved-road solutions, and drive modernization efforts that improve scalability, reliability, developer productivity, and operational efficiency.

Requirements

  • You bring 10+ years of experience building and evolving large-scale distributed systems, data platforms, or backend infrastructure, with a track record of influencing technical direction beyond a single team.
  • You have deep experience designing and operating large-scale data processing platforms using technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, ClickHouse, or similar distributed systems.
  • You have led architectural decisions for complex systems and can balance scalability, performance, reliability, maintainability, and business needs when making technical tradeoffs.
  • You have successfully driven complex initiatives across multiple teams and functions, aligning stakeholders around durable technical solutions without direct authority.

Nice to have

  • Are you ready to revolutionize the advertising industry?
  • Now, we're growing!
  • Your work will shape the scalability, reliability, and strategic capabilities of Cognitiv's data platform for years to come.

Skills

  • Experience designing, scaling, and maintaining petabyte-scale data platforms
  • Expertise in distributed systems architecture and large-scale data processing
  • Experience driving platform modernization or data architecture transformations
  • Experience operating in high-growth startup or scale-up environments
  • Deep familiarity with Flink, ClickHouse, Kafka, Iceberg, or similar modern data technologies
  • Java/Python, Spark, Flink, Kafka, Iceberg, ClickHouse, and AWS services (EMR, EKS, S3)

Compensation

  • $170,000 - $240,000 CAD Base Salary + Equity
  • Career development with clear advancement paths
  • Hybrid work model & daily team lunch
  • 401(k) & RRSP with employer match
  • Employee Assistance Program
  • Comprehensive onboarding (Cognitiv University)

Benefits

  • We also invest deeply in career development through clear advancement paths and comprehensive onboarding via Cognitiv University - plus additional perks designed to support both your professional and personal wellbeing.
  • Base salary is just one part of your total rewards at Cognitiv-you'll also receive equity and a comprehensive benefits package.
  • Medical, Dental and Vision plan for US employees & Extended Health Benefits for Canadian employees
  • 12 weeks paid parental leave + 4 weeks WFH
  • Unlimited PTO + Work-From-Anywhere August
  • Equity for all employees

Company info

  • At Cognitiv, we believe great work happens when people feel supported, challenged, and empowered to grow.
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This listing is sourced directly from Cognitiv's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.