Principal Software Engineer (AWS, Node.js and Python)

At Nielsen, we are passionate about our work to power a better media future for all people by providing powerful insights that drive client decisions and deliver extraordinary results. Our talented, global workforce is dedicated to capturing audience engagement with content - wherever and whenever it’s consumed. Together, we are proudly rooted in our deep legacy as we stand at the forefront of the media revolution. When you join Nielsen, you will join a dynamic team committed to excellence, perseverance, and the ambition to make an impact together. We champion you, because when you succeed, we do too. We enable your best to power our future.

This position requires 8+ years of experience developing and delivering services, logic and systems in a cloud based environment and ecosystem. The position is a combination of both an individual contributor to the organization’s AWS-based backoffice as well as a manager for a small backoffice team that is responsible for those AWS-based systems. The backoffice team supports the proper functioning of the company’s mobile assets (mobile apps) and is a part of a broader organization that owns the company’s mobile measurement and metering platforms. The position requires a deep, broad and solid background on cloud-based technologies, APIs, services, features, packages and frameworks.

This role will act as the technical product owner, individual contributor and lead for the AWS backoffice development team. This team is in charge of maintaining, optimizing and enhancing the current technology stack needed to serve the organizations mobile applications. This position will take high level requirements from various Product stakeholders, break them into technical user epics and stories and lead the development scrum team towards implementation. At the same time, this position will provide technical guidance and direction to backend developers and testers. The successful candidate will have the responsibility, in collaboration with technical leads from other teams and business owners, to architect systems and APIs involving mobile apps and backend servers for Nielsen’s major, strategic initiatives. Finally, the successful candidate will have the responsibility to deliver quality products and deploy them across different world markets using and employing best practices including unit test, test automation, CI/CD.

Responsibilities

• Technical product owner for all backoffice development
• Run a small team of AWS backoffice, devops and data engineers and developers
• Technology leader for all our AWS-based backoffice systems and logic
• Drive and implement architecture in all AWS-based backoffice assets such as Collections, Crediting, Processing, Monitoring, MDL etc.
• Drive alignment between server-side and mobile side for implementing different measurement technologies to support Nielsen panels
• Work with the Product team and clients to understand their needs and how to deliver solutions to meet these needs
• Drive AWS-based solutions to support the organizations mobile apps, Deliver and enforce best practices, set technology roadmap for our systems
• Identify and track any technical debt and make plans for reducing it
• Stay on top and ahead of industry trends and changes that may affect our processing systems or logic and products. This includes AWS technology changes, new services, depreciation of existing services, as required, in order to ensure there is never any impact to our systems and especially the production ones which operate on on 24x7 basis
• Track and be accountable for the overall AWS cost of our systems. Optimize systems to reduce cost, stay within set budget
• Write/review user stories and maintain the related backlogs. Break business requirements into epics and stories, as needed, converting these requirements into actionable technical work and assigning it to team members
• Perform code reviews with developers, approve code merges to the main branch
• Supervise and guide team members (developers and testers) towards the completion of their assignments
• Mentor junior members of the team
• Drive R&D and innovation to achieve more efficient methodologies or enhance existing ones
• The candidate is expected to help with development especially in situations of project pressure, prototype new ideas and generally contribute to maintaining smooth operation of our backoffice services both in prod and nonprod.

Key Skills

• Should be an experienced, AWS ecosystem and services technology leader with minimum 8 years (6 years with a Masters) of experience in designing, implementing and delivering solutions in the cloud. AWS certification (like solutions architect) is a strong desire
• Experience in technical leadership for a diverse team of developers both locally and internationally
• Proven record of managing technology teams in the past especially teams with cloud developers and/or data engineers
• Programming skills in Node.js and Python
• Demonstrated experience in AWS, EMR and Serverless architecture
• Knowledge of AWS security best practices, including IAM roles, security groups, and data encryption methods to ensure data integrity and compliance with industry standards.
• Strong architectural skills, including the ability to design highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems
• Good knowledge on Apache Spark and its ecosystem including Spark Core, Spark SQL, memory management, and optimization
• Strong background in AWS Cloud services, including:Big Data processing (EMR, Glue, Athena).EMR cluster configuration and optimization, Storage solutions (S3, DynamoDB, RDS), Microservices architecture (Lambda, API Gateway, Route53), Real-time data processing (Kinesis), Notification services (SNS, SQS), Orchestration (Step Functions, Data Pipeline), Logging (Cloudwatch), Cost management and monitoring strategies
• Proficient in leveraging columnar storage formats, particularly Apache Parquet
• Experience in Agile software development methodology
• Experience in source control like Git
• Direct experience in CI/CD pipelines and workflows, GitLab CI preferred
• Understanding of networking communication protocols especially HTTP/S is preferred
• General understanding and knowledge of Mobile systems, protocols and concepts on iOS and Android is a definite plus. All server-side systems this candidate will own are serving and supporting the company’s mobile apps
• Be able to assess existing systems and contribute to strategies to make them high performing and efficient
• Have the ability to work independently and be a self-starter.
• Excellent communication, documentation and presentation skills
• Make independent sound decisions and possess the ability to take responsibility for specific projects or definable portions of larger projects
• Leadership skills: commitment to excellence, accepting responsibility for results, and making quality decisions
• Flexible to attempt alternate solutions to resolve issues and adjust to a dynamic, changing technical and business environment

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