Staff Software Engineer

Our Data In Flight (DIF) team owns the core pipelines that ingest and route user and event data into Iterable, powering identity, segmentation, and real-time personalization. We are building a multi-tenant data platform that application teams can build on top of, with clear contracts, SLOs, and guardrails. Our product and our Elasticsearch clusters are multi-tenant, and we run Elasticsearch on Kubernetes using Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK).

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer with a track record of operating Elasticsearch-backed data platforms in multi-tenant SaaS. You’ll be a hands-on IC who both designs distributed systems and acts as a platform “product owner” for app teams: understanding their needs, shaping the platform roadmap, and defining stable interfaces between product and data infrastructure.

• Own and evolve core Data In Flight services (ingestion, user and event APIs, identity, system events) with a focus on reliability, performance, and cost.
• Lead the Elasticsearch strategy for our multi-tenant live user and event data: index and mapping design, shard strategy, and safeguards across shared clusters.
• Design and enforce platform contracts (APIs, data models, SLAs, and usage limits) that let product teams move quickly while keeping the data platform safe and scalable.
• Work across other data and application teams on initiatives such as Elasticsearch upgrades, guardrails, resharding, and event retention.
• Provide senior technical leadership during incidents and reviews, turning operational learnings into durable platform improvements.
• Mentor engineers on distributed systems, data modeling, and pragmatic use of Elasticsearch.

You likely have many of the experiences below, but not necessarily all of them:

• Hands-on Elasticsearch expertise in production:
• Supporting customer-facing features or platforms backed by ES
• Designing schemas and queries for high-cardinality, multi-tenant workloads
• Operating large clusters (capacity planning, scaling, incident response)
• Multi-tenant platform experience:
• Building shared data services used by multiple product teams
• Implementing rate limits, quotas, and noisy-neighbor protections
• Thinking in terms of contracts and SLOs, not one-off integrations
• Strong distributed systems background:
• JVM-based services (Scala/Java) and event-driven or streaming architectures
• Comfort with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS or similar), messaging, and caches
• Staff-level impact and collaboration:
• Leading cross-team projects from design through rollout
• Translating technical decisions into clear business and product trade-offs
• Clear written communication (RFCs, design docs, post-incident reviews)

• Experience with Scala and the Play framework or similar JVM stacks.
• Prior work on core user data platforms (identity, profile stores, event pipelines, or CDP-like systems).
• Exposure to FinOps / infra cost optimization in data-heavy systems.
• Experience in MarTech / AdTech or other high-volume, low-latency data domains.

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You may see all job vacancies on our official Iterable channels:

• Official Iterable website, Careers page: https://iterable.com/careers/
• Official LinkedIn Jobs page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/iterable/jobs/

Iterable is not affiliated in any way to these impostors and we hereby confirm that such individuals/entities are not authorized, encouraged, or sponsored to act on behalf of Iterable. Such job opportunities are entirely fake and not valid. Therefore, please disregard any written or oral request for a job offer or an interview that you believe is or might be fraudulent or suspicious and immediately reach out to us via email at [email protected] upon receiving a suspicious job offer.

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Iterable is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that proudly pursues and hires a diverse workforce. Iterable does not make hiring or employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion or religious belief, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sex, gender, gender-identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws or prohibited by Company policy. Iterable also strives for a healthy and safe workplace and strictly prohibits harassment of any kind. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and other similar state laws and local ordinances, and its internal policy, Iterable will also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.