Software Engineer - Kafka

About Day One Partners

Day One Partners is a search firm that partners with venture capital firms to help build high-growth startups. We lead confidential searches for leadership and critical roles across a range of company stages, industries, and functions

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Join a high-growth technology company building the data and machine learning backbone behind next-generation autonomy systems. In this role, you’ll help design and scale the infrastructure that powers intelligent machines across industries. If you’re excited about building from 0→1 and shaping foundational platforms, this is your opportunity to make a lasting impact.

What You’ll Do:

• Design and build large-scale data platforms handling petabytes of multimodal sensor data from real-world environments
• Develop high-performance data ingestion, processing, and storage systems (TBs per asset per day)
• Create tooling for data curation, labeling workflows, and quality evaluation
• Build and scale distributed systems using technologies like Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes, and modern workflow orchestration tools
• Partner cross-functionally to deploy scalable ML infrastructure across multiple product verticals

What You’ll Bring:

• Strong backend engineering experience building distributed systems
• Proven problem-solving skills in fast-paced, cross-functional environments
• Experience with modern data stack technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Hudi, Trino)
• Familiarity with data lakes, streaming architectures, and ML infrastructure

Why You’ll Love This Role:

• Build foundational systems at an early stage with broad ownership
• Work on complex, high-impact technical challenges at massive scale
• Collaborate with experienced engineers across data and machine learning

This is an in-office role (5 days/week) with flexibility when needed.