Senior Data Platform Engineer at Medium | $205K in Columbus

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—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 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.

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.)

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

• 4–6 years of experience across data engineering, backend engineering, DevOps, or SRE; comfortable wearing multiple hats. You're a generalist who thrives in ambiguity—you don't need the perfect playbook, but you can figure out the right thing to do and do it.
• 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.
• Comfortable working across the stack: experience 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.
• Approach legacy systems with curiosity: able to assess tech debt pragmatically, work within short-term constraints, and advocate for sustainable improvements over time.
• Care about 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.
• Good instincts about systems; adaptable and eager to learn. Able to advocate for an approach while remaining genuinely open to better ideas. This is a team that values collaboration and psychological safety.

Nice to Haves

• Experience using AI to improve a team's leverage, reach, output, and impact
• 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

• Fully distributed team: fully remote with 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:

• Yes to a diverse community
• Be part of a better internet
• Medium Rules
• Operating Principles

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

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