Staff Data Platform Engineer, Kargo
Mobile advertisement platform
Open for applications
Mobile advertisement platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
1001+ employees
Company mission
To empower advertisers to break convention and build connections with consumers on the most important screen today—the phone.
Role
Who you are
- You’ve built loosely coupled production services, APIs and SDKs in Python that multiple teams depend on
- You've built metadata-driven platforms that integrate with catalogs and check lineage, contracts and quality automatically
- You've built observability other teams depend on, and can tell a signal from noise
- You get tools adopted by teams that don't report to you through architecture reviews, mentorship, and clear communication
- Strong AWS, Terraform and Kubernetes experience
Desirable
- Experience moving from batch to streaming; understanding of cost tradeoffs
- Spark and Iceberg at significant scale, and Snowflake in production
- Ad tech, or another domain with high-volume event data and multiple consumers
- Experience building tooling and data structures that AI agents operate against
- Experience standing up a platform team's first generation of capabilities
- Data catalog, semantic layer, or governance tooling
What the job involves
- We're standing up a Data Platform team to solve these problems once for the whole company, and you'll be its founding engineer
- Working directly with the Sr. Director of Data Engineering, you'll shape the standards and build the software that enables and enforces them, open the platform up to contributors across Kargo, and grow the team as its scope expands
- You'll own it as a long-term product: modular tools and paved roads that let any team publish data and have it arrive discoverable, reliable, and observable enough to triage without tribal knowledge
- Build the data control plane. One place to see and govern what data products exist: schemas, lineage, ownership, freshness commitments, quality, access. Built for people browsing and agents querying
- Build the paved road for standing up a data product. Libraries, SDKs, templates, and data-specific CI/CD on Kargo's engineering platform, plus a supported near-real-time pattern. Following the standard should be easier than bypassing it
- Build the enforcement layer for the data standards. Schema registry, the contract validator and the CI step that runs it, automated certification
- Make every data product observable by default. Freshness, volume, schema conformance, and quality instrumented by the paved road rather than hand-built per team, emitting into Kargo's existing monitoring with the ownership and lineage metadata that makes AI-assisted triage possible
- Set the platform's technical direction. Architecture, roadmap, and build-versus-buy calls, informed by what the teams who produce and consume data actually need. Run the design reviews where they weigh in, and keep the platform modular enough that they contribute capabilities back
Our take
The way in which advertisers reach out to their audiences has changed dramatically over the last decade, primarily due to the invention of the smartphone. Whilst mobile ads have existed since the beginning of smartphones, most rely on technology that was built for desktops, resulting in bad advertising and missed opportunities.
Kargo provides a mobile advertising platform for marketers and publishers, helping them to deliver better business outcomes by leveraging advertising technology designed specifically for mobile. The company achieves this by directly integrating optimized impressions from the best-performing publishers within its specialized supply, using tangible identity metrics to analyze and improve advertiser KPIs, and overall, by facilitating personalized, mobile-optimized advertising.
The company acquired Videobyte (a video advertising platform for Connected TV) in early 2023 to expand operations into the relatively young digital TV industry and its lucrative TV formats. Bringing video, publisher tools, and unique formats to Kargo's omnichannel, this acquisition indicates a diversification of media for the advertising provider, which already has a firm grip on both mobile and desktop advertising platforms. On top of that, 2025 funding is being used for R&D of new AI-powered products and to broaden market reach.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
20% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Lower Manhattan, New York, NY
Leadership
Karry Kargman
(Founder & CEO)Experience as Corporate Business Developer for Intel Venture and Corporate Strategist for Intertainer.
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