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TaboolaStaff Engineer — Data Platform
Taboola seeks a Staff Engineer for its Data Platform team within the infrastructure department to build and scale core data systems. Operating at a scale involving…
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About This Role
Taboola seeks a Staff Engineer for its Data Platform team within the infrastructure department to build and scale core data systems. Operating at a scale involving billions of users and massive daily data volumes, the role involves managing complex challenges across Apache Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, and StarRocks. The person in this position will serve as a senior technical leader, designing distributed data systems, mentoring engineers, and shaping architectural direction. This…
Job Description
Taboola seeks a Staff Engineer for its Data Platform team within the infrastructure department to build and scale core data systems. Operating at a scale involving billions of users and massive daily data volumes, the role involves managing complex challenges across Apache Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, and StarRocks. The person in this position will serve as a senior technical leader, designing distributed data systems, mentoring engineers, and shaping architectural direction.
This hands-on individual contributor role suits an experienced software engineer with a deep background in JVM languages and large-scale data infrastructure. The position involves writing production code, optimizing performance, and guiding technical standards across R&D. Taboola provides performance-driven advertising technology that connects advertisers with publishers and major brands.
Responsibilities
- Shape the architecture, long-term roadmap, and technical direction of the Data Platform group
- Mentor and guide engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and pairing
- Raise group-wide engineering standards regarding design, testing, observability, and code quality
- Manage critical infrastructure issues including Spark performance, high-throughput Kafka ingestion, and StarRocks analytics
- Evolve the Spark SQL platform and core R&D framework code
- Develop the lakehouse architecture using Apache Iceberg for storage, ingestion, and serving
- Lead incident investigations and postmortems for primary data pipelines
- Collaborate with algorithm, product, finance, and infrastructure stakeholders
- Write production code and prototype new technology hands-on
- Represent the group in architecture forums, conference talks, and internal communities
Requirements
- More than 10 years of hands-on software engineering experience
- Deep expertise in Java or another equivalent JVM or object-oriented language
- Hands-on expertise with Apache Spark internals, Spark SQL, Catalyst optimizer, and scaling performance and costs
- Production experience with Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Hudi, covering table design, partitioning, compaction, and catalog management
- Expertise in Apache Kafka internals, delivery semantics, partitioning, and operating high-throughput production pipelines
- Practical experience using StarRocks or a comparable real-time analytics engine like Druid, ClickHouse, or Trino
- Background in designing, building, and owning large-scale distributed data systems end-to-end
- Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and foster technical leadership
- Experience driving technical alignment and influencing stakeholders across teams
- High proficiency with Linux and Kubernetes in production environments
Qualifications
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or equivalent experience
- Contributions to open-source data software such as Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, or StarRocks
- Public technical writing, blog posts, or conference presentations
- Experience running Spark on GPUs using RAPIDS or utilizing other query acceleration methods
- Familiarity with stream processing technologies including Spark Structured Streaming, Kafka Streams, or Flink
- Experience working with dbt or Airflow
- Knowledge of configuration systems like Ansible or Puppet
- Familiarity with AI agent workflows to accelerate engineering tasks
- Understanding of how machine learning training pipelines consume data
Core Skills
Benefits
- Comprehensive health benefits tailored to the region
- Fully stocked kitchen
- Location-specific well-being programs and perks
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
What is the location and work arrangement for this role?
The posting mentions a hybrid work schedule requiring 3 days in-office, with an option to work on-site more frequently if desired, and references an office in Tel Aviv.
What are the primary technical requirements for applicants?
Candidates must have 10 plus years of hands-on software engineering experience, deep expertise in Java or a similar JVM language, and practical production background with Apache Spark, Apache Iceberg or other table formats, Apache Kafka, and a real-time analytics engine like StarRocks. Linux and Kubernetes proficiency in production are also required.
What is the salary for this position?
The job posting does not specify a salary.
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