Staff Backend Software Engineer - Activations
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Nice to have
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP): GCS, Dataproc, GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, IAM.
- Workflow orchestration: Temporal or Cadence; Airflow or similar systems for long‑running, failure‑prone workflows.
- Apache Spark (or Dataproc) for large‑scale batch processing
- Experience with data warehouses such as SingleStore, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar.
- Streaming systems: Kafka/Redpanda, Pub/Sub, or equivalent event/streaming platforms, especially for high‑volume or incremental data processing.
- Experience designing multi‑tenant systems that enforce rate limits, fairness, and SLAs across many customers and destinations.
- Strong background in performance and cost optimization for large‑scale data workloads (e.g., 10–100x speedups, significant compute cost reductions).
- Prior experience working on advertising, marketing, or data activation platforms or other systems where data correctness, timeliness, and scale are all critical.
Full description
LiveRamp is shaping the future of responsible data collaboration between the world’s leading brands, retailers, financial services providers, and healthcare innovators. As consumers embrace new AI-driven experiences, the LiveRamp data collaboration network exponentially expands the breadth and accuracy of the data on which marketing AI capabilities operate, powering deeper customer insight and measurable performance on a global scale. LiveRamp is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices worldwide. Learn more at .
The Activations Backend team is responsible for the bulk of big data processing that powers LiveRamp’s primary activation product, which delivers hundreds of millions in annual recurring revenue. Our systems process over one hundred thousand batch jobs per day, ranging in size from gigabytes to over 100 terabytes, and power distributions to hundreds of downstream destinations. Cumulatively, our systems process multiple exabytes per year. We provide detailed monitoring, statistics, error recovery, and resiliency to keep this core product reliable for our largest customers.
At LiveRamp, big data processing is not just for back-office analytics. Our product is a big data product: we transform, deduplicate, and transport massive datasets across clouds and regions, while respecting complex rate limits and SLAs, and enabling many of the most successful companies on the planet to activate their data safely and efficiently.
Your team will:
- Re‑architect Activations Back End to be cloud‑forward and multi‑regional, taking advantage of SingleStore and other modern data warehouses to replace legacy Spark‑heavy flows where it makes sense.
- Deliver high‑throughput, low‑latency activation by combining: SingleStore‑backed state and delta computation, Spark/Dataproc for the heaviest batch workloads, and Streaming infrastructure (e.g., Redpanda/Pub/Sub) for event‑driven and incremental deliveries.
- Build smarter orchestration and scheduling using Temporal/Cadence and queueing services to: Classify jobs (latency‑critical vs. throughput‑heavy vs. background), Route them through multi‑queue schedulers and capacity pools, respect destination‑specific rate limits and SLAs, and eliminate duplicated work through config canonicalization and caching so identical or similar jobs across customers share heavy computation.
- Collaborate closely with partner teams (Identity, Data Foundation, Activations Fullstack, Integrations/OPI) to deliver end‑to‑end improvements in activation reliability, speed, and observability, and continuously raise the bar on operational excellence.
You will:**
- Lead the design and evolution of a petabyte‑scale activation platform, pushing it toward a delta‑first, cache‑aware, and cost‑efficient architecture.