Senior Data Engineer / SSE

About this role

Company: Apna
Role: Senior Data Engineer / SSE
Team: Data Platform / Engineering
Location: Work from Office - Domlur, Bangalore (5 days / week)
Experience : 4-6 Years of Experience
Why Join Apna
At Apna, data is central to how we build products, understand users, improve employer outcomes, power recommendations, and scale decision-making. This role gives you the opportunity to build the backbone of Apna’s data platform and influence how data is used across the company.
You will work on real-world, high-scale problems across jobs, users, employers, communities, matching, growth, and AI-driven systems.
About the Role
Apna is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build and scale our core data platform. This role will work on large-scale data pipelines, lakehouse architecture, query platforms, workflow orchestration, and data reliability systems that power analytics, product intelligence, machine learning, business dashboards, experimentation, and operational decision-making across Apna.
We are looking for someone who can think deeply about data architecture, design reliable pipelines, improve data quality, and help build a platform that can scale with Apna’s growth.
Requirements
What You’ll Own:
You will be responsible for designing, building, and operating critical parts of Apna’s data platform, including:

• Building scalable batch and near-real-time data pipelines across product, business, growth, and ML use cases.

• Designing and improving our lakehouse architecture using technologies likeApache Hudi.

• Working with query engines such asPresto / Trinofor large-scale analytical workloads.

• Building and maintaining orchestration workflows usingApache Airflow.

• Creating reusable data models, curated datasets, and reliable data marts for analytics and product teams.

• Improving data platform reliability, observability, SLA tracking, lineage, and data quality checks.

• Optimizing storage, compute, query performance, and pipeline costs.

• Partnering with product, analytics, ML, and backend engineering teams to understand data needs and convert them into scalable platform solutions.

• Driving engineering standards around data modeling, schema evolution, partitioning, deduplication, backfills, replayability, and pipeline ownership.

• Mentoring data engineers and influencing architecture decisions across teams.
What We’re Looking For
Must Have

• Strong experience indata engineering, preferably at scale.

• Hands-on experience withApache Airflowor similar orchestration systems.

• Strong knowledge ofPresto / Trinoor other distributed query engines.

• Good understanding ofApache Hudiconcepts such as:

• Copy-on-write vs merge-on-read

• Upserts and deletes

• Incremental reads

• Compaction

• Clustering

• Timeline and commits

• Schema evolution

• Partitioning strategy

• Strong knowledge of distributed data processing and storage systems.

• Ability to design and build reliable ETL / ELT pipelines.

• Strong SQL skills and ability to debug complex data issues.

• Good understanding of different data architectures, including:

• Data warehouse

• Data lake

• Lakehouse

• Lambda architecture

• Kappa architecture

• Medallion architecture

• Event-driven data architecture

• Experience with data modeling for analytics and reporting.

• Strong programming skills in at least one language such asPython, Java, or Scala.

• Ability to reason about trade-offs between freshness, cost, reliability, latency, and complexity.

• Strong debugging and production ownership mindset.
Good to Have

• Experience with Kafka, Spark, Flink, Hive, Iceberg, Delta Lake, or BigQuery.

• Experience building internal data platforms or self-serve data infrastructure.

• Experience with data quality frameworks such as Great Expectations, Deequ, Soda, or custom validation systems.

• Exposure to ML feature pipelines or feature stores.

• Experience with metadata management, data catalogs, lineage, and governance.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Understanding of privacy, compliance, PII handling, and access control in data systems.
What Success Looks Like
In this role, success means:

• Critical business and product datasets are reliable, discoverable, and trusted.

• Pipelines are observable, recoverable, and have clear SLAs.

• Query performance improves across major analytical workloads.

• Data freshness and quality issues reduce significantly.

• Teams can build on top of the data platform faster without reinventing pipelines.

• The platform can scale with Apna’s user, job, employer, and engagement data.