Staff Software Engineer, Data

Role Overview: Staff Software Engineer, Data at Liftoff Mobile

Liftoff Mobile, a leading AI-powered performance marketing platform for the mobile app economy, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join its Supply Data Engineering team. In this pivotal role, you will be instrumental in shaping and executing the long-range data platform roadmap, driving infrastructure modernization, performance optimization, and observability enhancements. This is a unique opportunity to lead prototyping efforts towards a unified internal data environment within a company that supports over 6,600 mobile businesses across 74 countries.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and deliver high-impact, multi-quarter data infrastructure projects from inception to stable production rollout, independently driving design and execution.
• Architect and evolve large-scale data systems, focusing on long-term reliability, maintainability, cost efficiency, and alignment with Liftoff's security, inclusion, and quality standards.
• Shape technical direction for the data team and adjacent teams by identifying key priorities, driving technical alignment across functions, and influencing decisions through deep expertise.
• Scope and resolve complex, ambiguous technical problems end-to-end, taking full ownership beyond implementation, including documentation, integration testing, monitoring, and production hygiene.
• Develop and maintain internal frameworks, tools, and observability infrastructure to improve developer productivity and system resilience at scale.
• Mentor engineers across multiple levels by offering thoughtful design and code reviews, coaching on architectural decisions, and fostering growth.
• Contribute to hiring, interviewing, and upholding the engineering bar across the organization.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, or a related technical field; Advanced degrees (MS/PhD) are a plus but not required. Equivalent practical experience in large-scale systems or platform engineering is also acceptable.
• 8+ years of experience in software/data engineering (6+ years for MS/PhD).
• Strong hands-on experience with distributed systems including Apache Spark/Flink, Iceberg/Deltalake, Trino/Presto, and Kafka.
• Fluency in Scala or Python, with clean coding and debugging skills in large-scale systems.
• Experience deploying and operating services in Kubernetes, including Helm-based configuration management.
• Familiarity with cloud-native CI/CD workflows (e.g., Argo CD, Github Action, Jenkins, etc.).
• Familiarity with Jupyter Notebooks for data exploration, prototyping, or collaborative workflows.
• Proven ability to deliver infrastructure projects from planning to production in a cross-functional setting.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and ability to lead cross-team collaborations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with data analytics tooling such as Looker or other semantic modeling layers.
• Prior use of Apache Druid for low-latency analytics or high-throughput ingestion.
• Hands-on experience building or maintaining Apache Airflow pipelines.
• Contributions to open-source systems or internal platform tooling.
• Background in building internal developer platforms or ML infrastructure.
• Familiarity with cost-aware and inclusive data design principles.

Location and Work Arrangement

This role is hybrid, requiring a minimum of 3 days/week from our Beijing office (Guomao). Employees are expected to attend in-person team gatherings at least once per quarter for collaboration and team building.

Compensation and Benefits

Liftoff offers a full compensation package including competitive salaries, equity, and health/vision/dental benefits associated with your country of residence. The base salary range for this role is 610,000 - 750,000 RMB annually, varying based on location and experience. Liftoff is committed to an inclusive environment as an equal opportunity employer.

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• Apache Spark
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Scala
• Python
• Data Engineering
• Data Architecture
• Cloud-Native CI/CD
• Infrastructure Modernization