Backend Data engineer

- 5+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on backend systems and/or data platforms

- Strong PostgreSQL skills - schema design, normalization, indexing strategies, query optimization, and understanding of execution plans (EXPLAIN ANALYZE)

- Hands-on experience with database migration tools - Django Migrations, Alembic, Flyway, Liquibase, or similar. Must understand forward and rollback migrations, dependency ordering, and safe deployment of schema changes in production

- Proficiency in Python for backend development - Django or FastAPI experience strongly preferred

- Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) - managed databases, compute, or storage services in a production environment. Azure experience is a plus given the team s direction, but is not mandatory

- Experience reading and interpreting product requirement documents (PRDs) and translating them into data models and technical implementations

- Solid understanding of relational database fundamentals - ERD design, normalization (3NF and beyond), referential integrity, and transaction management

- Familiarity with Git-based workflows, CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker) and basic orchestration (Kubernetes / AKS), and agile development practices

- Strong communication skills - ability to discuss schema trade-offs, propose alternatives, and document decisions clearly

- Conceptual familiarity with data engineering fundamentals - understanding of ETL/ELT concepts, batch vs. streaming data flows, and data lake/warehouse patterns

Preferred

Data Engineering Cloud (Upcoming Team Focus)

- Experience with Azure cloud services - Data Factory, Data Lake Gen2, Synapse Analytics, Event Hub, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB

- Hands-on ETL/ELT pipeline development - ingestion, transformation, orchestration using tools like Apache Airflow or Azure Data Factory

- Understanding of data lake architectures and medallion (bronze/silver/gold) layering patterns

- Experience with Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and Kusto Query Language (KQL)

- Familiarity with Snowflake, BigQuery, or other cloud data warehousing platforms

Backend Systems

- Experience with NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cosmos DB) - data modeling, aggregation pipelines

- Understanding of event-driven architecture, messaging systems (Kafka, Event Hub), and pub/sub patterns

- Understanding of distributed systems concepts - partitioning, replication, consistency trade-offs

- Experience with streaming frameworks (Spark Structured Streaming, Azure Stream Analytics)

Domain Other

- Prior experience in retail, supply chain, or large-scale e-commerce systems

- Familiarity with dbt or similar ELT transformation tools

- Experience with IoT data pipelines and real-time telemetry processing

We are looking for a Backend Data Engineer to join a cross-functional engineering team building and scaling a cloud-based platform in the retail and supply chain domain. The role is centered on backend and database engineering - designing PostgreSQL schemas, writing and maintaining migration scripts, reviewing PRDs to recommend schema and performance optimizations, and contributing to a Django-based application. As the team expands into data platform modernization on Azure, a working knowledge of data engineering concepts will be increasingly valuable.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will own schema design decisions, write production-grade migration scripts, debug query performance issues, and work closely with product and platform teams to deliver features end-to-end.

What You Will Do

- Design, review, and optimize PostgreSQL schemas for new application features - define tables, indexes, constraints, and relationships based on PRDs and technical requirements

- Write and maintain database migration scripts using Django Migrations (or equivalent ORM-based migration tools), ensuring migrations are reversible, tested, and production-safe

- Review product requirement documents (PRDs), identify data modeling implications, and proactively suggest schema or query optimizations before development begins

- Diagnose and resolve database performance issues - slow queries, missing indexes, lock contention, connection pooling, and query plan analysis

- Contribute to the Django application codebase - defining and updating models, writing and reviewing migration scripts, and ensuring schema changes align with application requirements

- Collaborate with data scientists, product managers, and frontend engineers to translate business needs into robust data models

- Participate in code reviews, system design discussions, and technical documentation

- Support the teams Azure migration efforts as they ramp up - contributing to data pipeline design, ETL development, and cloud infrastructure decisions

- 5+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on backend systems and/or data platforms