● 6+ years building and operating production data systems, including demonstrated ownership of streaming or event-driven pipelines - on-call, incident response, SLOs, runbooks, and recovery, not just development.
● Deep, production experience with Apache Kafka - partitioning, consumer groups, consumer-lag and broker-health troubleshooting, exactly-once/idempotent semantics, schema registry, and replay/backfill under load.
● Strong, hands-on Apache Spark experience (PySpark) for streaming and batch transformation in Production.
● AWS-native data engineering across streaming, processing, storage, and catalog services (e.g. MSK, EMR, Glue, S3, Athena), with infrastructure-as-code - AWS CDK (preferred) or Terraform - CI/CD for data pipelines, and cost awareness.
● Comfort debugging distributed data pipelines (consumer lag, data skew, backpressure, late/out-of-order events) with observability tooling (e.g. Datadog/Cloudwatch).
● Expert-level SQL and Python, and experience building and consuming REST APIs.
● An AI-forward engineering mindset, with demonstrated hands-on use of AI-assisted and agentic development tools, an opinion on where AI adds value (and where it doesn’t), and an understanding of agentic data consumption patterns and needs to act on trusted operational data—including context management, lineage, provenance, permissions, freshness, and low-latency access for agentic discovery.
● Change data capture and open table formats - CDC (e.g. Debezium) plus Iceberg or Delta Lake: schema evolution, partitioning, and table maintenance.
● Data contracts, schema governance, and cataloging - schema registries and compatibility rules with dead-letter handling; and familiarity with a technical metastore (e.g. Glue Data Catalog, Unity Catalog) and a governance/discovery catalog (e.g. Atlan, Alation, Collibra).
● Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or another quantitative field, and comfort on the command line / a Unix-based OS (we are 100% Mac+Linux at Gravie).
● Health insurance domain knowledge - HIPAA Protected Health Information (PHI) and governing access to it.
● Excellent communication skills and demonstrated success in driving results through influence and collaboration.