Senior Software Engineer, Compute

Requirements

• At least 5 years of software engineering experience, including hands-on experience with large-scale distributed data systems or compute engines like Apache Spark.
• Proficient in Python or another mainstream OOP language. We care about strong engineering fundamentals and adaptability.
• Familiar with the modern data stack (dbt, Databricks, Airflow, or equivalents).
• Hands-on with Databricks in production, especially Unity Catalog, cluster policies, or serverless compute and performing cloud cost optimisation at scale.
• Solid AWS fundamentals (IAM, S3, EC2, networking) and infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform.
• You treat CI/CD, testing, and observability as core engineering principles, not afterthoughts.

What you'll be doing

• Design, build, and operate self-serve solutions based on Databricks, Airflow, and Spark infrastructure that runs Bolt's data workloads so that data practitioners can provision, deploy, and debug.
• Keep 800+ daily Databricks jobs reliable, observable, and cost-efficient with an observability layer that detects pipeline failures and surfaces areas for improvement.
• Scale Looker reporting and ad-hoc querying on shared warehouses; own routing, cluster sizing, and the performance-versus-cost trade-offs for the 4,000+ Bolt employees, serving 300,000+ queries daily over petabytes of data.
• Build the AI surface over the platform - stand up Databricks MCP servers, put agents to work on our pipelines, and build the self-service tooling that means teams no longer route through us.
• Work directly with Analytics Engineering, Data Science, ML, Experimentation, Ingestion, Governance, and SRE Data teams - as a partner.

Nice to haves

• Some perks may differ depending on your location and role.
• At Bolt, using AI daily is a baseline expectation for everyone. If there's a faster, smarter way to do your work, we expect you to find it. You're still responsible for the output, so the standard stays high when using AI tools. Experience is great, but what we really look for is drive, intelligence, and integrity. So even if you don't tick every box, please consider applying!