Lead Data Platform Engineer

📋 Description

• • YAZIO GmbH is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Lead Data Platform Engineer to spearhead the transformation of its data infrastructure into a robust, scalable, and AI-enabled backbone. This pivotal role is designed for an individual who thrives in a hands-on architectural leadership capacity, taking full ownership of all processes preceding the data warehouse layer. This includes the critical areas of data ingestion, transformation, and feature infrastructure, while simultaneously cultivating the operational maturity necessary to support AI-driven personalization at an unprecedented scale. The ultimate goal is to contribute to YAZIO's mission of becoming the world's most successful nutrition app by shaping the future of personalized nutrition.
• • In this new phase of growth, YAZIO's data platform must adeptly handle increasing complexity, volume, and the integration of AI-powered product features. The Lead Data Platform Engineer will be instrumental in evolving the platform from its current state, which primarily serves analytics needs, into a proactive, production-grade infrastructure. This evolution will empower greater experimentation velocity and foster significant product innovation.
• • Key responsibilities will encompass owning the reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency of all ingestion and transformation systems. This involves designing and implementing robust infrastructure capable of real-time and near-real-time feature computation, ensuring that data is processed and made available with minimal latency. Furthermore, the role demands the definition and rigorous enforcement of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), alongside the establishment of comprehensive monitoring and incident management practices to guarantee platform stability and performance.
• • A significant aspect of this position involves setting high architectural standards for the data platform and proactively preventing reactive migrations by employing foresight and making well-considered trade-offs. The Lead Data Platform Engineer will be responsible for translating complex platform initiatives into measurable Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that demonstrably contribute to product success and business outcomes. Close collaboration with the Analytics team will be essential to define clear ownership boundaries and ensure seamless integration between platform capabilities and analytical needs.
• • Beyond technical leadership, this role includes leading and nurturing a small, ambitious team of engineers. This involves mentoring team members, raising overall technical standards, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and high performance. The Lead Data Platform Engineer will be actively involved in hands-on technical work, including contributing to Request for Comments (RFCs), participating in architecture reviews, leading incident response efforts, and providing direct mentorship to team members.
• • The ideal candidate will possess extensive experience in designing and operating large-scale, cloud-based data platforms in production environments. A strong foundation in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and streaming pipelines is crucial. Proven ownership of production reliability, demonstrated through experience with SLAs/SLOs, monitoring, and incident handling, is a key requirement. Experience architecting systems that have successfully scaled through significant growth phases, coupled with a clear awareness of cost-performance trade-offs for compute-intensive workloads, is highly valued.
• • The role also requires experience in enabling data-driven product features or AI-powered use cases, such as feature computation and low-latency access patterns. Essential to this position is solid people leadership experience, including a track record of leading engineers, taking responsibility for their growth, and managing their performance. The candidate must possess strong architectural judgment and the confidence to make and defend critical technical decisions. The ability to translate infrastructure work into tangible, measurable business outcomes is paramount for success in this role. Candidates who have worked in product-driven, high-traffic environments and understand the challenges of scaling systems will find this role particularly rewarding.