Staff Software Engineer, Big Data
Cognitiv
| Company | Cognitiv |
| Category | Engineering |
| Location | Vancouver |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Not stated |
| Salary | Not stated by the employer |
| Posted | 25 Jun 2026 |
| Last verified | 30 Jul 2026 |
| Source | Employer career page (greenhouse) |
Description
Are you ready to revolutionize the advertising industry?
At Cognitiv, we are not just another AdTech company—we are industry trailblazers redefining media buying with our Deep Learning Advertising Platform. Since 2015, we have harnessed the power of cutting-edge deep learning technology and data science to transform how brands connect with their customers. Our mission? To bring intelligence to advertising and deliver unparalleled precision, relevance, and impact at scale.
With our innovative platform, advertisers enjoy unprecedented flexibility—whether it is activating Dynamic Deals through their preferred DSP, leveraging our managed service DSP, or utilizing our industry-first ContextGPT product. As a part of Cognitiv, you will be at the forefront of AI-driven advertising solutions, driving change and achieving remarkable growth in a rapidly evolving industry.
Now, we’re growing! The Role
As a Staff Software Engineer, Big Data , you will define and drive the long-term technical direction of the data platform that powers Cognitiv's AI-driven advertising products. You will lead the architecture and evolution of critical data systems spanning ingestion, warehousing, machine learning feature generation, identity resolution, and activation at massive scale.
As a senior technical leader, you will identify systemic challenges, align teams around durable solutions, and drive complex initiatives that span engineering, science, machine learning, and product organizations. Your work will shape the scalability, reliability, and strategic capabilities of Cognitiv's data platform for years to come.
Location: Our Vancouver office will open on September 1 in Mount Pleasant. The Founding Engineering team will work remotely through the summer. Starting September 1, the role will transition to a hybrid model: in-office Monday-Wednesday, with remote flexibility on Thursday and Friday.
Your Impact
In this role, success is measured by the durability of your technical solutions, the health of the data platform, and your influence across the engineering organization. You will:
Lead Platform Architecture: Define and evolve the architecture of Cognitiv's large-scale data platform, ensuring ingestion, storage, processing, and serving systems can scale to support future business growth, AI initiatives, and increasing data volumes.
Drive Multi-Team Data Initiatives: Lead complex, cross-functional programs spanning Data Engineering, Machine Learning, Science, and Product teams. Align stakeholders, reduce execution risk, and deliver outcomes that improve platform capabilities across the organization.
Shape Long-Term Technical Direction: Evaluate architectural tradeoffs with a 3–5 year horizon, establish technical standards and paved-road solutions, and drive modernization efforts that improve scalability, reliability, developer productivity, and operational efficiency.
Elevate Reliability and Operational Excellence: Lead architecture reviews, failure-mode analysis, and incident retrospectives. Establish mechanisms to proactively identify, prioritize, and reduce technical risk across critical data systems.
Own Cost and Efficiency at Scale: Treat cost as a first-class architectural dimension for a multi-petabyte data platform. Lead cost vs. performance tradeoff decisions across storage tiering, compute, file layout, and data movement, and build the visibility and guardrails that let teams reason about unit economics when they design systems.
Advance Data and ML Platform Capabilities: Guide the evolution of foundational systems including the identity graph, ML feature platform, feature projection infrastructure, warehouse architecture, and large-scale distributed processing frameworks.
Partner on Strategic Priorities: Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Science, and Machine Learning leadership to align platform investments with business objectives, bal