About this role.
Medium is hiring a Senior Data Platform Engineer to modernize and operate the data infrastructure supporting product, analytics, recommendations, writer statistics, and payments. The role combines data engineering, DevOps, SRE, and backend engineering, with ownership of reliability, observability, platform migrations, and Python-based tooling. The engineer will work across AWS, pipeline technologies such as Snowflake, dbt, and Spark, and potentially Kubernetes and ML infrastructure. Success requires pragmatic legacy-system stewardship, strong platform-product thinking, and collaboration with engineers and stakeholders across a fully remote organization.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
4/5Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
4/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.
Sample interview questions
I would begin by assessing the user impact, pipeline criticality, recent changes, and available telemetry. I would mitigate the immediate issue through rollback, retry, scaling, or a safe manual recovery, then identify the root cause using logs, metrics, lineage, and dependency analysis. Afterward, I would add durable protections such as data-quality checks, alerting, runbooks, retries, and ownership documentation.
I would first document current workloads, dependencies, service-level expectations, data contracts, and failure modes. I would define a target architecture, migrate incrementally through parallel runs and validation, and establish clear rollback criteria. Throughout the migration, I would communicate tradeoffs and progress to downstream users while measuring correctness, performance, cost, and operational burden.
Python is effective for orchestration utilities, API integrations, validation frameworks, infrastructure automation, and operational tooling. I focus on maintainable modules, strong tests, typed interfaces where useful, structured logging, clear error handling, and metrics so tools are dependable in production. I also prioritize documentation and reusable patterns so other engineers can safely extend the platform.
I would prioritize end-to-end pipeline health, freshness, volume and schema changes, data-quality outcomes, lineage, job duration, resource utilization, and cost signals. Alerts should be actionable and tied to user impact or defined service objectives rather than noisy low-level events. Dashboards, runbooks, and ownership metadata should make it easy for both platform engineers and downstream users to understand system status.
I separate immediate reliability risks from strategic debt, then make the tradeoffs visible through a roadmap that includes both operational commitments and modernization milestones. Repeated incidents are strong signals for investment, so I look for changes that eliminate classes of toil rather than only resolving symptoms. I would align priorities with stakeholders using impact, risk reduction, engineering effort, and user value.
About Medium
Medium is one of the world’s most influential writing platforms, connecting millions of readers with ideas that matter. We’re a small, dedicated team that cares deeply about craft, curiosity, and building something that lasts. We make decisions efficiently and iterate fast, think carefully, and take the work seriously – without taking ourselves too seriously.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Senior Engineer to play a key role in Medium’s Data Platform team, building and evolving the data infrastructure that powers Medium’s business. As a member of the data platform team, you’ll own the reliability, performance, and long-term architecture of the systems that data scientists and engineers at Medium depend on every day—everything from ingestion and transformation to orchestration and observability. The work you do will ensure that readers and writers on Medium can receive personalized recommendations, view up-to-date writer stats, make subscription payments without friction, and reach the right readers with each post.
This isn’t a pure data engineering role; it’s part data engineering, part DevOps, part SRE, and part backend software engineering, with the massive opportunity to help transform a collection of aging systems into a modern foundation that engineers across the org are proud to build on. The role is equal parts stewardship and transformation, and we’re looking for someone who can keep critical systems running reliably while also moving us toward our vision of a modern, well-instrumented data platform. If you’re someone who finds both of those things interesting—someone who can triage a pipeline failure in the morning and spend the afternoon thinking through a migration strategy, keeping the long-term vision in mind—this might be the role for you.
What you will do (Key Responsibilities)
- Build, maintain, and modernize the data infrastructure that Medium’s product and engineering teams depend on to do their best work
- Own reliability of our data infrastructure: Identify risks, instrument better observability, and drive improvements that reduce toil for the whole org
- Bring a product mindset to platform ownership, partnering with engineers and stakeholders across teams to understand their data infrastructure needs and help design systems they can use and trust
- Contribute to the long-term platform roadmap, including migration of end-of-life systems toward modern, maintainable alternatives
- Write and review Python-based tooling for pipeline orchestration, data quality, and infrastructure automation
- Apply DevOps and SRE best practices: think about uptime, monitoring, alerting, and deployment practices as first-class concerns
- Mentor teammates and improve shared standards around reliability, documentation, and platform ergonomics
- Attend Medium’s twice-yearly, in-person offsites (hosted in locations around the U.S.)
Who are you? (Skills, Knowledge & Expertise)
- You have 4–6 years of experience across data engineering, backend engineering, DevOps, or SRE, and you’re comfortable wearing multiple hats (sometimes at once). You’re a generalist who thrives in ambiguity who doesn’t need the perfect playbook; but you can figure out what the right thing to do is and do it!
- You’re proficient in Python. Our data platform is primarily Python-based, and strong Python skills are essential. We’ll expect candidates to demonstrate Python proficiency during the interview process.
- You’re comfortable working across the stack. You’ve worked with data pipeline tooling (Snowflake, dbt, Spark, or similar), cloud infrastructure (AWS), and at least some backend services work. You don’t need to be an expert in all of them, but you need to be able to learn quickly in any of them.
- You approach legacy systems with curiosity. You can assess tech debt pragmatically, work within short-term constraints, and advocate for sustainable improvements over time.
- You care about your downstream users and understand that the measure of a great platform is whether the engineers who depend on it can do their jobs well
- Experience with Snowflake, Kubernetes, data observability tooling, or ML infrastructure is a plus.
- You have good instincts about systems, and are adaptable and eager to learn. You can advocate for an approach while remaining genuinely open to better ideas. This is a team that values collaboration and psychological safety, and we want someone who adds to that culture.
Nice to Haves
- Experience using AI to improve a team’s leverage, reach, output and impact
- You’re comfortable operating without a dedicated PM layer: you’ve owned product/platform direction, not just technical execution
- You personally use Medium and are genuinely excited to contribute to its mission: empowering humans to write meaningfully for other humans
Benefits
In addition to the new skills you’ll pick up, here’s what else you’ll enjoy by working at Medium:
- Working with a fully distributed team: We’re fully remote and have teammates across the U.S. & France
- Healthcare benefits covered at 100% for employees and 80% for dependents
- Generous parental leave policy
- Mental health support through Spring Health (or find a provider through Rula or Kaiser Mental Health Network)
- Financial wellness support through Northstar
- Stipends for co-working, professional development, wifi, and a one-time home office bonus
- Unlimited PTO and standard company holidays
- A discounted Medium membership
Why Medium
At Medium, inclusion, diversity, and equity are core to how we work and what we build. We believe a more inclusive team creates a better product—one that’s intuitive, thoughtful, and serves a wide range of users. We strive to foster a supportive, fun, and challenging environment where people from all backgrounds can thrive.
We welcome applicants from all walks of life and strongly encourage those from historically underrepresented groups to apply. Our hiring process is built to ensure fairness and equal opportunity for everyone. Even if your experience doesn’t match every requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your perspective and passion matter more than checking every box. We actively track representation across our hiring pipelines and hold ourselves accountable to building inclusively.
Learn more about our mission, operating principles, and culture:
Read about our story here.
Read our guidance on AI use for candidates. We believe human ideas have the power to change how people think, for the better. That belief shapes how we hire. We use AI tools ourselves, but we’ve thought carefully about where it adds value and where it gets in the way of something important.
Salary Range
$165,000—$205,000 USD
GDPR Notice
We will process your personal data as part of our recruitment process, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For details on how we use your data, including the legal bases for processing, how long we retain it, and your rights under GDPR, please refer to our Privacy Notice.
We may retain your information for future job opportunities based on our legitimate interest in building a talent pool. You can object to this at any time by contacting us at recruiting@medium.com.
CCPA Notice
If you are a California resident, you have rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). These include the right to know what personal information we collect about you, the right to request deletion or correction of your data, and the right to opt out of certain uses.
During the hiring process, we may collect personal information such as your name, contact details, resume/CV, employment history, education background, and any information gathered through interviews or assessments. We may share this information with service providers who support our recruitment process, in compliance with CCPA/CPRA. This information is used solely for recruitment and hiring purposes.
We do not sell or share your personal information as defined under CCPA/CPRA. Candidate data is retained for up to 48 months for our legitimate business purposes and in accordance with applicable laws.
To exercise your rights or request more information, please contact us at recruiting@medium.com. This notice can also be found on our Privacy Notice.
Upload your resume now
- To unlock remote work opportunities and be discovered by global employers.
This job listing has been manually reviewed by the Jobicy Trust & Safety Team for compliance with our posting guidelines, including verification of the company's legitimacy, accuracy of job details, clarity of remote work policy, and absence of misleading or fraudulent content.
