Senior Data Engineer (Platform Focus)

About the role

MDPI Poland is looking for a Senior Data Engineer with a platform focus to lead the architecture and evolution of its internal Data Platform. This is a fully in-office role in Kraków, with a strong emphasis on open-source technologies. The role is a senior individual contributor who designs scalable platform infrastructure, defines team standards, mentors engineers, produces Architecture Decision Records and drives reliability initiatives.

Key responsibilities

• Design scalable, resilient platform architectures using open-source technologies, including IaC, Kubernetes and Docker standards
• Architect and deliver platform microservices with well-defined interfaces, and evaluate open-source query engines and table formats
• Design compute and storage strategies and observability frameworks (metrics, tracing, logging)
• Contribute to data lakes, data warehouses and ETL/ELT pipelines, and define data modelling, pipeline optimisation, data quality and governance standards
• Integrate and process data from multiple sources consistently and accurately
• Mentor junior and intermediate engineers, conduct code and architecture reviews, and influence the platform roadmap

Required profile

• University degree, at least a Master's in Computer Science or a related field
• 5+ years of experience in data engineering or data platform engineering
• Ability to work independently, manage time and collaborate in a diverse, international team

Required skills

• Deep Kubernetes knowledge and expert Docker skills
• Open-source query engines, open file formats and microservice design
• Observability (distributed tracing, metrics, SLOs) and advanced Python and SQL
• RDBMS, data orchestration tools, data partitioning and incremental scalability
• Good to have: academia experience, PhD, C++/Rust, advanced CI/CD and IaC, document and graph databases

What we offer

• Competitive salary
• Private medical care (fully covered) and a MultiSport card (partially covered)
• Team building activities