Senior Data Platform Engineer

About Medium

Medium is one of the world's most influential writing platforms, connecting millions of readers with ideas that matter. We're a small, dedicated team that cares deeply about craft, curiosity, and building something that lasts. We make decisions efficiently and iterate fast, think carefully, and take the work seriously - without taking ourselves too seriously.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Engineer to play a key role in Medium's Data Platform team, building and evolving the data infrastructure that powers Medium’s business. As a member of the data platform team, you'll own the reliability, performance, and long-term architecture of the systems that data scientists and engineers at Medium depend on every day—everything from ingestion and transformation to orchestration and observability. The work you do will ensure that readers and writers on Medium can receive personalized recommendations, view up-to-date writer stats, make subscription payments without friction, and reach the right readers with each post.

This isn't a pure data engineering role; it's part data engineering, part DevOps, part SRE, and part backend software engineering, with the massive opportunity to help transform a collection of aging systems into a modern foundation that engineers across the org are proud to build on. The role is equal parts stewardship and transformation, and we’re looking for someone who can keep critical systems running reliably while also moving us toward our vision of a modern, well-instrumented data platform. If you’re someone who finds both of those things interesting—someone who can triage a pipeline failure in the morning and spend the afternoon thinking through a migration strategy, keeping the long-term vision in mind—this might be the role for you.

What you will do (Key Responsibilities)

• Build, maintain, and modernize the data infrastructure that Medium's product and engineering teams depend on to do their best work
• Own reliability of our data infrastructure: Identify risks, instrument better observability, and drive improvements that reduce toil for the whole org
• Bring a product mindset to platform ownership, partnering with engineers and stakeholders across teams to understand their data infrastructure needs and help design systems they can use and trust
• Contribute to the long-term platform roadmap, including migration of end-of-life systems toward modern, maintainable alternatives
• Write and review Python-based tooling for pipeline orchestration, data quality, and infrastructure automation
• Apply DevOps and SRE best practices: think about uptime, monitoring, alerting, and deployment practices as first-class concerns
• Mentor teammates and improve shared standards around reliability, documentation, and platform ergonomics
• Attend Medium's twice-yearly, in-person offsites (hosted in locations around the U.S.)

Who are you? (Skills, Knowledge & Expertise)

• You have 4–6 years of experience across data engineering, backend engineering, DevOps, or SRE, and you’re comfortable wearing multiple hats (sometimes at once). You're a generalist who thrives in ambiguity who doesn’t need the perfect playbook; but you can figure out what the right thing to do is and do it!
• You're proficient in Python. Our data platform is primarily Python-based, and strong Python skills are essential. We'll expect candidates to demonstrate Python proficiency during the interview process.
• You're comfortable working across the stack. You've worked with data pipeline tooling (Snowflake, dbt, Spark, or similar), cloud infrastructure (AWS), and at least some backend services work. You don't need to be an expert in all of them, but you need to be able to learn quickly in any of them.
• You approach legacy systems with curiosity. You can assess tech debt pragmatically, and work with the team to prioritize improvements.