Senior Backend + Infrastructure Engineer (Platform)

Data quality is the bottleneck of the AI era. Every Fortune 500 is trying to solve it. We're the team they call. Soda is the data quality layer for Disney, Ralph Lauren, CBRE, HelloFresh, 2K Games, and Nubank. Our open-source engine, Soda Core, is used by companies like Tesla, Slack, Adyen, Walmart, and JPMC. The category is growing fast because AI doesn't work on bad data.

About Us

Soda's mission is to monitor the world's decisions. We're building the first Data & AI performance monitoring platform that spans data collection to automated decision-making. Soda helps customers find, understand, and fix data quality issues by combining automated post-production monitoring with pre-production pipeline data testing. Soda was founded in 2019 by Maarten (employee #5 at Collibra) and Tom (creator of multiple open-source projects generating hundreds of millions in value). We commercialize through Soda Cloud and we're well-funded, with investors like Point 9 Capital, Hummingbird, Singular, and Eurazeo.

The Role

You’ll join our Platform team and own the full path from backend service to production: the Java services that power Soda Cloud and the AWS/Kubernetes infrastructure they run on. To be clear about the shape of this role: you're a backend engineer first. Most of your time goes into designing and building services. Infrastructure is the part of your craft that lets you own them all the way to production, not a separate job. This is not a DevOps or SRE position. You ship features, and you make sure the platform underneath them scales to billions of datasets. We're product engineers, not ticket-takers: you'll talk to users, shape solutions with your PM, and ship end-to-end. No hand-offs, no waiting. We also build agentically: AI coding agents are part of how the whole team ships, and the platform you own is a big part of what makes them effective.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build robust backend services and APIs in Java for a multi-tenant SaaS platform.
• Ship product features end-to-end and work directly with product and customers on what to build.
• Improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of the services you own, and carry them all the way to production on our AWS/Kubernetes platform.
• Keep the team shipping fast: CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, observability.
• Improve the systems that make agentic development work: fast CI feedback, reliable dev environments, and the guardrails that let agents ship safely.
• Drive architectural decisions, from service design to how the platform underneath should evolve.

We answer every application, and every candidate hears back within 3-5 days of each step. If it's not a hell yes, it's a no, and we'll tell you quickly and kindly.

Requirements You Should Have

• 5+ years building backend software at a product company: you've designed, built, and owned real production services, not just operated them.
• Strong Java: APIs, async processing, concurrency, performance tuning.
• Solid SQL in a backend context: schema design, query optimization, migrations in production. We run MySQL and ClickHouse.
• Architectural judgment: you understand how API and service design choices shape data flow, query patterns, latency, and failure modes at runtime.
• You run what you build: your services have lived on Kubernetes and AWS (EKS, IAM, networking, RDS, S3) in production, and you're happy owning that layer for the team.
• CI/CD, GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code: GitHub Actions, ArgoCD/Flux, Terraform or Pulumi, plus solid scripting.
• Observability as a habit: metrics, logging, tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry), and you actually write tests.
• Agentic engineering: you ship production code with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) in the loop, and you know how to direct them well while keeping the quality bar high.
• Independence: you don't need hand-holding in a distributed, async team across 12+ countries.
• Fluent English.

Good to Have

• Multi-tenant SaaS at scale; high-growth startup experience.
• Python: our data engineering stack runs on it.
• Regulated-environment experience (ISO27001, SOC2).
• Experience building agentic workflows into the product: LLM-powered features, tool-using agents, or AI-driven automation shipped to real users.
• Data quality, data management, data observability, or ML monitoring industry experience.

Benefits

• Compensation €85,000-120,000/year + equity.
• Fully remote (EU-based), with a Belgian office available if you want one.
• All the tokens you need, across all frontier models.
• Real ownership, real impact, no micromanagement.
• A team of senior engineers who ship, across 12+ countries.

Our Values

We value freedom with responsibility, transparency, and a growth mindset. We avoid politics, have no tolerance for dishonesty, and value open and direct communication without judgment. We proactively bring up and address potential issues before they become critical, and we overcommunicate frequently. Working at Soda, you will have full autonomy to make impactful product and roadmap decisions.

Why you will love to join Soda

• Be part of a transformation: data quality is having its moment, and we're at the front of it.
• Ownership from day one: if you see a bottleneck, you remove it.
• International culture: colleagues in 12+ countries.
• Work on your own terms: fully remote, flexible hours.

What you might not love

• Rapidly changing priorities: our roadmap can pivot quickly. It's a fast-paced environment with a LOT of work to be done.
• Flexibility required: you will have to learn new things all the time.