Backend Engineer (Python/Kafka)

Location: Athens, Greece; hybrid workplace

Company

hirify.global develops a global cargo intelligence platform for commodity and maritime data.

What you will do

• Lead the end-to-end integration of US inland waterway barge data, from external feed ingestion and domain modeling to streaming and UI distribution.
• Design entity-resolution systems that map barge data to vessels, zones, installations, and products using Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL patterns.
• Build Kafka-based event-driven pipelines with Avro schemas, deduplication, and dead-letter queue replay mechanisms using Python and Scala.
• Deliver integrated data to Elasticsearch read models, external APIs, data warehouse feeds, and the hirify.global Terminal built with TypeScript and Vue.
• Own production operations by setting SLOs, maintaining observability, participating in on-call rotations, and driving post-incident improvements.
• Mentor engineers, document architecture, validate external feeds, and support the decomposition of legacy systems into event-driven services.

Requirements

• Approximately 5+ years of experience designing, operating, and maintaining production data-intensive systems.
• Advanced Python and SQL skills, with the ability to build well-bounded services in large and evolving codebases.
• Production experience with Kafka streaming, including Avro, Schema Registry, deduplication, and replay patterns.
• Experience integrating third-party data feeds, mapping schemas, resolving entities, and monitoring data quality.
• Experience with production observability, technical documentation, and incident resolution in distributed systems.

Nice to have

• Scala or functional programming experience.
• Knowledge of PostGIS or geospatial data, or experience in maritime, logistics, or commodities domains.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, Airflow, Snowflake or lakehouse table formats, Kubernetes, and GitOps deployments.
• Working knowledge of TypeScript or Vue for collaboration on customer-facing terminal features.

Culture & Benefits

• Ownership follows a “you build it, you run it” operating model.
• The role includes design authority and responsibility for production services.
• Work includes on-call participation and continuous post-incident improvement.
• Collaboration takes place across engineering crews and analyst workflows.