Senior Backend Engineer - Commodities
Overview:
In this role you will own and build core components of Kpler's real-time trade intelligence platform, extending inland data feeds into the broader system. You'll design and operate high-throughput, data-driven subsystems and collaborate with marine tracking teams to deliver a unified platform for customers. The role emphasizes ownership, operational excellence, and direct engagement with early customers to shape the product roadmap. This is a high-autonomy, build-and-run environment focused on scalable, production-grade solutions.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and operate major platform components end-to-end (streaming ingestion with Kafka, Airflow; backend in Python/FastAPI; frontend in TypeScript/Vue)
- Lead subsystem architecture through design specs, peer reviews, and build-versus-adapt decisions
- Maintain production excellence via SLOs, observability, on-call rotations, and incident response
- Architect data quality frameworks including telemetry validation, reconciliation, and time-series monitoring
- Collaborate with marine tracking and data platform teams to integrate inland feeds into the platform
- Mentor mid-level engineers with technical guidance and coding standards
- Engage with early customers and product leaders to demo features, gather feedback, and influence roadmaps
Key requirements:
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in distributed production systems
- Experience architecting event-driven or data-intensive systems using streaming technologies like KafkaStrong backend in Python and REST API design (FastAPI), with frontend contributions (TypeScript/Vue)
- Experience managing production cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), including SLOs, incident management, and observability
- Proven ability to mentor engineers and engage with end-users or stakeholders
- Mentoring and technical guidance
- Customer-facing collaboration with traders, analysts, and operations teams
- Strong communication and problem-solving under pressure
- Kafka or similar message queues
AirflowPython