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Job Summary:
KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management and capital markets solutions. They are seeking a Data Platform Engineer to join their ADAPT Engineering team, focusing on designing and constructing data engineering capabilities that efficiently process large data pipelines and integrate across cloud-powered databases.
Responsibilities:
• Lead the architecture, buildout, and modernization of the firm’s unified data fabric, establishing scalable patterns for data access, interoperability, governance, and productization across business and technology teams.
• Own the design and evolution of Iceberg-based data platform capabilities, including data ingestion, egress, data replication, data streaming, performance optimization, data lifecycle management, and adoption standards for analytical and operational use cases.
• Define and implement the platform’s compute architecture across stateful, stateless, and distributed processing layers, balancing performance, resiliency, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Design, implement and drive the adoption of event-driven architecture patterns for real-time ingestion, data movement, and system integration, ensuring low-latency, reliable, and observable data flows.
• Extend core platform capabilities to support the firm’s AI/ML ecosystem, including curated datasets, feature-ready pipelines, training and inference data services, and scalable integration points for model development and deployment.
• Translate business and engineering priorities into a clear technical roadmap, making sound architecture decisions and sequencing platform investments to maximize long-term value.
• Serve as the senior engineering lead across one or more strategic platform domains, partnering closely with application engineering, enterprise architecture, data consumers, and machine learning stakeholders.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for data quality, observability, lineage, governance, security, and operational excellence across batch and streaming environments.
• Mentor junior engineers, raising the bar on engineering excellence including design rigor, implementation quality, and operational ownership across the team.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and guide proof-of-concept efforts, with accountability for recommending production-ready solutions aligned to the firm’s target-state architecture.
Qualifications:
Required:
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline; advanced degree preferred.
• 4+ years of experience in data engineering, distributed systems, or platform engineering, with meaningful experience operating at a senior technical leadership level.
• Platform mindset with proven track record designing and delivering enterprise-scale data platforms or lakehouse ecosystems with strong emphasis on scalability, reliability, governance, and developer enablement.
• Deep hands-on experience with Apache Iceberg and modern open table formats, including data modeling, partitioning, performance tuning, metadata management, and operational best practices.
• Strong understanding of distributed compute architectures, including stateful and stateless processing models, workload orchestration, fault tolerance, and performance optimization.
• Demonstrated experience implementing event-driven and streaming architectures using modern messaging and data movement patterns.
• Experience enabling or extending AI/ML platform capabilities, including pipeline design, feature/data preparation workflows, and integration with model development or production ML systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL; experience with Java or Scala and modern data processing frameworks is highly desirable.
• Experience working in cloud-native and containerized environments, with familiarity in orchestration, infrastructure automation, and platform observability tooling.
• Ability to operate as a senior technical decision-maker: influencing architecture, driving execution through others, and partnering effectively across engineering, product, and business stakeholders.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Preferred:
• Advanced degree preferred.
• Experience in AI Harness engineering is highly desirable.
Company:
KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management as well as capital markets and insurance solutions. Founded in 1976, the company is headquartered in Hudson, USA, with a team of 1001-5000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.