<p><strong>Realize your potential by joining the leading performance-driven advertising company!</strong></p> <p>As a Staff Engineer - Data Platform on the infrastructure department in ourTel Aviv Office, you’ll play a vital role in as a Staff Engineer – Data Platform in the Infrastructure Department in our Tel Aviv office, you’ll play a vital role in building the core data platform that powers Taboola’s reporting, billing, ML training, experimentation, revenue optimization, and business decision-making — ensuring data is reliable, fresh, scalable, and easy to use.</p> <p>You’ll be a senior technical leader across the Data Platform group, owning the hardest technical challenges across Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, and StarRocks. As a hands-on individual contributor, you’ll drive technical excellence and make every engineer around you better through mentoring and technical leadership.</p> <p>1.4 billion users. 950,000 requests per second. 150TB of fresh data every day. 800M metrics every minute. That's the scale Taboola's Data Platform group operates at.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>To thrive in this role, you'll need:</strong></p> <ul> <li>10+ years of hands-on software engineering, with deep expertise in Java or an equivalent JVM/object-oriented language</li> <li>Deep, hands-on expertise in Apache Spark — internals, Spark SQL and the Catalyst optimizer, and performance and cost tuning at scale</li> <li>Production experience with Apache Iceberg (or another open table format such as Delta Lake or Hudi) — table design, partitioning, compaction, and metadata/catalog management</li> <li>Deep expertise in Apache Kafka — internals, partitioning and delivery semantics, and operating high-throughput pipelines in production</li> <li>Hands-on experience with StarRocks or a similar MPP/real-time analytics engine (Druid, ClickHouse, Trino)</li> <li>Lead by example with AI: introduce agent-based engineering workflows, measure their impact, and help the group adopt them</li> <li>A track record of designing, building, and owning large-scale distributed data systems end to end — from architecture to production reliability</li> <li>Proven experience mentoring engineers and growing technical leaders — through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing</li> <li>Ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across teams, managers, and stakeholders</li> <li>Highly proficient with Linux and Kubernetes in production</li> <li>B.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent experience</li> </ul> <p><strong>Bonus points if you have:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Contributions to open-source data projects (Spark, Iceberg, Kafka, StarRocks, or similar)</li> <li>Conference talks, blog posts, or other public technical writing</li> <li>Experience running Spark on GPU (RAPIDS) or other query acceleration techniques</li> <li>Experience with stream processing (Spark Structured Streaming, Kafka Streams, Flink)</li> <li>Experience with dbt and/or Airflow</li> <li>Knowledge of Ansible, Puppet, or similar configuration systems</li> <li>A track record of leveraging AI agents to accelerate engineering work</li> <li>Familiarity with how ML training pipelines consume data, to partner effectively with algo teams</li> </ul> <p><strong>How you’ll make an impact:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Shape the technical direction of the Data Platform group — the architecture, the long-term roadmap, and the bets we make on emerging tech (Iceberg, StarRocks, GPU Spark, dbt, AI tooling)</li> <li>Mentor and grow engineers across the group: lead design reviews, pair on hard problems, review code with care, and help strong engineers grow into technical leaders</li> <li>Raise the engineering bar group-wide — set standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational excellence</li> <li>Own the hardest problems on our stack: Spark performance and cost across 60,000+ jobs/day, Iceberg table management at Taboola scale, high-throughput Kafka ingestion, and low-latency analytics on StarRocks</li> <li>Evolve our Spark SQL platform and the core framework code used across R&D — making the call on what gets built, refactored, or retired</li> <li>Drive the evolution of our lakehouse, with Iceberg as the backbone — from ingestion through storage, compaction, and serving</li> <li>Be the go-to expert for the production health of the main Taboola data pipeline — the system behind reports, ML model training, billing, and other business-critical processes — and lead deep-dives and postmortems on the toughest incidents</li> <li>Partner with team leaders, group managers, and fellow principal engineers to shape how the platform evolves across R&D, balancing the needs of algo, product, finance, and infrastructure stakeholders</li> <li>Stay deeply hands-on — write production code, build prototypes, and prove out new technology before the group commits to it</li> <li>Represent the group internally and externally — in architecture forums, hiring, open-source communities, and conference talks</li> <li>Directly shape how billions of people discover the internet</li> </ul> <p> </p> <h2><strong>Here are some of the things engineers in our group have done — or are doing right now</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Pioneered deployment of Spark SQL workloads on GPU with RAPIDS</li> <li>Delivered a real-time pipeline reports product serving all our customers on top