Staff Software Engineer, Data Systems

At Hive, we’re all about creating moments that matter and helping event marketers connect with their biggest fans. Our platform powers marketing for 1,500+ iconic events, festivals, venues, and promoters across North America. We help them grow their customer base and sell out shows using intelligent, automated, and personalized digital marketing tools.

Hive integrates with 25+ platforms (like Ticketmaster and Shopify) to provide rich customer data in real-time, enabling event marketers to engage their audiences with precision and impact.

What Data at Hive looks like

Hive’s R&D Data Pod is responsible for how we store and query production data at scale. We aren’t focused on BI or dashboards — we build the systems that power Hive’s products and make data accessible, reliable, and performant.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll play a key role in evolving this infrastructure: scaling our production datastores, enabling predictable query performance across hundreds of millions of records, and moving the platform toward real-time, event-driven data flows. You’ll partner with other engineering teams to ensure Hive’s data foundations support both today’s products and tomorrow’s growth.

What you’ll get up to:

• Build our Data/ML Platform: Build a cloud-native big data platform to handle audience data for millions of attendees, tracking billions of interactions every year. You will create the most comprehensive and valuable insights about the live music audience.

• Lead your Peers: You will be Hive’s data systems expert - how do we create petabyte scale-data stores that handle millions of events a data without breaking a sweat? You’ll be growing our people as much as our systems.

• Working across the entire Pipeline: From Change Data Capture through validation, transformation and denormalization, you’ll be driving the stack. Data Modeling, Python coding or infrastructure design - no two days are ever the same.

• Deliver predictable performance: Design and build high-volume async event handling systems to quickly update audience data based on external event streams. Extend Hive’s query systems to ensure reliable query execution across hundreds of millions of data points. You’re designing for performance a rounding error away from O(1).

• Enable Hive’s data model: Bridge the gap between the needs of our core marketing platform and our next generation data and ML platform. You see the world through a lot of eyes, not just your own.

Our Tech Stack

• AWS, including RDS, Kinesis, Glue, Lambda and S3

• Python and PySpark

• Clickhouse

• MongoDB

• ElasticSearch

• Django

What you bring

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures (specifically CDC and streaming). Experience introducing or migrating to event-driven architectures

• Strong technical leadership and communication skills, providing mentoring and cross-team collaboration

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on data systems (databases, pipelines, infrastructure)

• Experience working with very large-scale datasets (hundreds of millions to billions of rows).

• Strong SQL skills and experience designing schemas and optimizing queries in large-scale relational and analytical databases (preferrably MySQL and ClickHouse)

• Proficiency in Python and PySpark for building production-grade systems, including data pipelines, backend services, and orchestration frameworks

• Understanding of data quality, governance, and compliance principles in production systems

• Experience scaling production datastores and managing safe, low-disruption data migrations

• Familiarity with AWS data infrastructure (RDS, S3, Kinesis, Redshift), cloud-native scaling and infrastructure as code

Who you are:

• Comfortable operating independently and making progress in ambiguous, fast-changing environments

• Biased toward action. You’re willing to make decisions with imperfect information and iterate quickly, communicating with other teams inside product and engineering

• Skilled at troubleshooting complex systems and building durable solutions when things break

• Excited to shape the future of Hive’s data infrastructure and team in a high-growth, fast-paced company

Nice to haves:

• History of owning or re-architecting a data platform end-to-end in a fast-growing environment.

• Background in SaaS or event-driven products where data systems directly power user-facing features.

Compensation/Benefits Package

• Meaningful salary and equity: you're rewarded based on impact.

  • The compensation range for this role is $180,000 to $225,000 CAD per year, depending on qualifications and experience. This compensation range takes into account a wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to job-related skills, experience and relevant training, and business and organizational needs. New team members typically start between $180,000-$202,500, based on experience and alignment with the expectations outlined in this posting. This range reflects not just where you begin, but the growth we expect and invest in as you grow at Hive.

• Work fully remote from the comfort of your home.

• Flexible work hours: minimal meetings and no 9-5

• Health & Dental coverage with Parental Leave top-ups in addition to EI benefits

• Unlimited vacation/PTO: so you can be happy and healthy!

About Hive.co

Hive.co is a marketing platform for event marketers. We help brands personalize and automate their campaigns, using email and SMS, to empower them to sell out so they can focus on making their events unforgettable.

By integrating with ticketing partners like Ticketmaster and e-commerce partners like Shopify, we enable brands to access and act on all their customer data, so they can easily segment their list in thousands of ways, and send more customized, timely email campaigns that land in inboxes.

We started our company inside a University of Waterloo computer lab in early 2014, graduated from Y Combinator that summer (S14 batch) and have been growing ever since. Originally based in Kitchener, our team is now 100% remote and located all across Canada! We strive to provide an online work environment that allows team members to have a strong work life balance while still feeling connected to their team and Hive’s mission.

To learn more about our team check out our About Us page on our website: https://www.hive.co/about