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Kpler is a global intelligence platform founded in 2014 that simplifies complex trade information and provides actionable insights for the commodities, energy, and maritime sectors. With over 850 experts across 69 countries, the company transforms intricate data into strategic intelligence for traders, analysts, and operations teams.
In this Senior Backend Engineer role, you will design, build, and operate major platform components end-to-end, spanning high-throughput streaming ingestion (Kafka, Airflow, Python/FastAPI) to web applications (TypeScript/Vue). You will lead subsystem architecture by writing design specifications, conducting peer reviews, and making pragmatic build-versus-adapt decisions. A key focus is guaranteeing production operational excellence through rigorous SLO management, comprehensive system observability, on-call rotation, and incident response.
You will architect data quality frameworks—including telemetry validation, reconciliation, and time-series monitoring—to ensure field sensor data is accurate and reliable. Collaboration with core marine tracking and data platform teams is essential to seamlessly integrate inland data feeds into Kpler's broader platform architecture. You will mentor mid-level engineers through technical design guidance, code reviews, and pair programming while setting team-wide engineering conventions. Additionally, you will partner directly with early customers and product leaders to demo features, gather feedback, and shape product roadmaps.
Kpler values decisive action, collaborative problem-solving, and a supportive, accessible culture. The company is committed to diversity, inclusion, and welcoming people of different backgrounds and experiences.
**Requirements:**
Must-haves:
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating distributed production systems
- Proven experience architecting event-driven or data-intensive systems using streaming technologies like Kafka or similar message queues
- Strong backend engineering mastery in Python and REST API design (e.g., FastAPI), alongside comfort contributing to frontend surfaces (TypeScript/Vue)
- Direct experience managing production cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), including SLO establishment, incident management, and deep observability
- Demonstrated capability to mentor engineers, guide technical discussions, and engage directly with end-users or stakeholders
Nice-to-haves:
- Experience with Scala or running Elasticsearch clusters at scale
- Hands-on background handling IoT telemetry, remote sensor feeds, time-series data, or geospatial datasets
- Domain knowledge in energy, oil & gas, or global commodities markets
- Prior experience as an early or founding engineer in a new product initiative
