Senior Data Platform Engineer

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Design and evolve Sword's streaming lakehouse, the foundation every data consumer in the company depends on
• ▹Build and operate distributed streaming pipelines that move data at low latency and high reliability
• ▹Own the durable workflows that coordinate complex data movement across systems
• ▹Shape the platform's API surface so producers and consumers never need to touch infrastructure
• ▹Drive evaluations and integrations with vendor data platforms, sitting inside the architectural trade-offs
• ▹Contribute to the self-service and agentic layer: interfaces designed to be consumed by humans, systems and AI agents alike
• ▹Partner with data engineers and analysts on contracts, governance and lineage
• ▹Build and maintain AI-ready data infrastructure that powers ML and AI-driven products
• ▹Leverage AI coding assistants and LLMs to accelerate development, automate documentation and raise code quality
• ▹Work in a regulated environment where audit, compliance and governance are part of every design

Requirements

• ▹Proven experience designing and operating data platforms at scale: warehouse, data lake or lakehouse architectures in production
• ▹Hands-on experience with a modern lakehouse table format (Iceberg strongly preferred; Delta Lake or Hudi also welcome), including how it works under the hood: metadata layout, snapshots, manifests, compaction, copy-on-write vs. merge-on-read
• ▹Clear mental model of catalogs (REST, Polaris, Glue, Unity, Hive), their trade-offs and how compute stays detached from storage
• ▹Exposure to at least one vendor lakehouse or query platform (Snowflake, Starburst or Databricks), at the level where you can reason about its architecture, not just use its UI
• ▹Strong experience with a distributed processing engine (Flink strongly preferred; Spark also fine): reasoning about internals, fine-tuning a running job and debugging a silently degrading pipeline
• ▹Familiarity with durable execution (Temporal, Restate or similar), or at minimum a solid mental model of what it means and why it matters for data workflows
• ▹Production experience building and operating APIs (REST or gRPC) at scale, with good instincts about contracts, versioning, retries, rate limiting and observability
• ▹Solid understanding of Kafka and event-driven architectures (producers/consumers, partitioning, delivery semantics)
• ▹Comfortable in regulated environments (healthcare, fintech, gov) where audit, compliance and data governance are part of every design
• ▹Platform mindset: you design for self-service and API-first, with systems and agents, not only humans, as legitimate consumers

Nice to have

• ▹Deeper familiarity with open/REST catalogs (Polaris, Nessie, Unity) beyond basic use
• ▹Observability stack fluency (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• ▹Prior work on agentic or AI-facing API surfaces, or MCP-style interfaces
• ▹Experience in HIPAA, FedRAMP or SOC 2 environments
• ▹dbt, DataHub or data contract tooling exposure

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Total compensation (base, variable and equity): EUR 52,500-82,500
• ▹Additional benefits beyond total compensation (may vary by country)

About the company

Sword Health pioneers AI Care: a clinical-centric AI lab and applied AI platform building a 24/7, AI-native care program. The Data Platform team makes data usable across clinical, operations, AI and product teams.