Senior Software Engineer II

About the role

Join the Data Platform team at StepStone Group and provide technical leadership for a scalable, reliable, and well‑governed data platform. You will define technical direction, drive architectural decisions across data, platform and infrastructure, and collaborate closely with engineering managers, product managers and enterprise architects. This role is central to re‑imagining the labour market and delivering AI‑enabled analytics and business‑critical products.

Key responsibilities

• Define and evolve the technical vision, roadmap and architecture of the Data Platform, influencing decisions across data, platform and infrastructure domains.
• Establish engineering standards, best practices and reusable patterns while partnering with Enterprise Architecture.
• Drive engineering excellence by improving code quality, testing, observability, reliability and operational practices.
• Support end‑to‑end delivery by guiding teams through complex technical challenges and contributing to planning and risk management.
• Mentor engineers, grow senior technical capabilities and champion AI‑assisted development and automation.

Required profile

• Proven experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer or equivalent senior individual‑contributor leadership role.
• Strong background in data platforms, distributed systems and cloud‑native architectures, with experience shaping technical direction across teams and stakeholders.

Required skills

• AWS cloud services.
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Kafka/MSK for streaming.
• Airflow for workflow orchestration.
• AWS Glue and Apache Spark for data processing.
• Data lake / lakehouse architectures (e.g., Iceberg or similar table formats).
• Batch and streaming data processing.
• Data quality, governance, cataloguing and observability tools such as Datadog.
• DBT and AI‑assisted engineering practices.

What we offer

• 29 days holiday allowance plus bank holidays.
• Private medical and dental healthcare.
• Pension contribution up to 10%.
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme.
• Life Assurance Cover.
• Cycle‑to‑work scheme.
• Hybrid working model.
• Volunteering days.
• Dog‑friendly office.