This role involves designing scalable data ingestion systems and building a centralized data lake on Apache Iceberg. Responsibilities include improving performance and reliability, collaborating with data engineers, and providing technical leadership.
Coupa makes margins multiply through its community-generated AI and industry-leading total spend management platform for businesses large and small. Coupa AI is informed by trillions of dollars of direct and indirect spend data across a global network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers. We empower you with the ability to predict, prescribe, and automate smarter, more profitable business decisions to improve operating margins.
Why join Coupa?
🔹 Pioneering Technology: At Coupa, we're at the forefront of innovation, leveraging the latest technology to empower our customers with greater efficiency and visibility in their spend.
🔹 Collaborative Culture: We value collaboration and teamwork, and our culture is driven by transparency, openness, and a shared commitment to excellence.
🔹 Global Impact: Join a company where your work has a global, measurable impact on our clients, the business, and each other.
Learn more on Life at Coupa blog and hear from our employees about their experiences working at Coupa.
The Impact of a Sr. Lead Software Engineer at Coupa:
At Coupa, we are building a centralized, modern data platform on Apache Iceberg, designed to operate across a multi-cloud environment and power customer-facing analytics at scale. Our platform processes large volumes of data every day, combining batch ingestion and CDC-based streaming events, and serves data that is directly consumed by our customers.
This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with high ownership and technical depth. A key part of the role is continuously improving latency, reliability, and performance as the platform scales.
You will work on challenging, real-world data problems—ranging from high-throughput ingestion to enabling sub-second data retrieval and query performance—while influencing architecture and best practices across the broader data ecosystem. If you enjoy solving complex data platform problems, working close to production systems, and seeing your work directly impact customers, this role offers constant opportunities to make a meaningful impact without becoming repetitive.
What You’ll Do
- Design and implement scalable, high-throughput data ingestion systems that integrate internal and external data across domains
- Design and build core data platform components, including ingestion, validation, orchestration, and lineage, with a focus on code quality and reliability
- Build and evolve a centralized data lake using Apache Iceberg (or similar table formats)
- Work across multi-cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) to design and implement cloud-agnostic data ingestion and processing patterns
- Contribute hands-on to the Semantic layer, ensuring data is easy to consume for BI and analytics teams
- Partner with Senior Data Engineers, Platform Engineers, and Analytics Engineers to align how data is produced, stored, and consumed
- Establish practical engineering standards for testing, observability, and operational excellence
- Provide technical leadership through mentorship, code reviews, and design discussions, while remaining hands-on
What You Will Bring to Coupa
- 8-10+ years of experience in software or platform engineering, with a focus on building scalable data and analytics platforms
- Strong understanding of data ingestion patterns at scale, including CDC, and how data should be modeled and stored in a data lake for fast, efficient retrieval
- Proven experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines in production
- Experience working with modern data warehouses such as Databricks, BigQuery, or Snowflake
- Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with a focus on writing production-quality, maintainable, and testable code
- Hands-on experience working with cloud data services in AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Experience working with query engines such as Presto or Trino to enable fast, reliable analytics over data lakes
- Familiarity with Lakehouse architectures and table formats such as Iceberg or Delta Lake
- Familiarity with data governance, lineage, metadata, cataloging, and data quality practices
- Nice to have exposure to semantic layers, metrics frameworks, or BI-friendly data modeling
- Experience supporting analytics or AI/ML workloads
Nice to have:
The estimated pay range for this role is $149,000 - $193,500
The starting salary for the successful candidate will be based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location.
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Coupa complies with relevant laws and regulations regarding equal opportunity and offers a welcoming and inclusive work environment. Decisions related to hiring, compensation, training, or evaluating performance are made fairly, and we provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified candidates and employees.
Please be advised that inquiries or resumes from recruiters will not be accepted.
By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read Coupa’s Privacy Policy and understand that Coupa receives/collects your application, including your personal data, for the purposes of managing Coupa's ongoing recruitment and placement activities, including for employment purposes in the event of a successful application and for notification of future job opportunities if you did not succeed the first time. You will find more details about how your application is processed, the purposes of processing, and how long we retain your application in our Privacy Policy.
Top Skills
Apache Iceberg
AWS
Azure
BigQuery
Databricks
GCP
Presto
Python
Snowflake
SQL
Trino
Coupa Chicago, Illinois, USA Office
350 N. Orleans St, Chicago, IL, United States, 60654
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