Big Data Engineer [L2]

Who we are

Alef Education began with a bold idea: that every learnerdeserves a personalised and meaningful education experience. What started in2016 as a small pilot programme in Abu Dhabi has evolved into one of theworld’s most dynamic EdTech companies—reshaping how millions of students engagewith learning across the globe.

Today, Alef is proudly headquartered in the UAE, workinghand-in-hand with ministries of education, schools, and teachers to bringsmart, data-powered platforms into classrooms in over 14,000 schools.

Supporting over 1.1 million students and 50,000 teachersacross the UAE, Indonesia & Morocco our AI-driven platforms generate 16+million data points every day, helping drive smarter learning decisions.Whether it’s improving national exam results, boosting classroom engagement, orsupporting educators with world-class tools, Alef is committed to impact atscale.

In 2024, Alef made history as the first EdTech company tolist on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX), cementing our role as aregional innovator with global reach.

About The Role

As a Big Data Engineer you will have a strong understandingof big data technologies with an exceptional ability to code.You willprovide technical leadership, working closely with the wider team to ensurehigh quality code is delivered in line with the project goals and deliverycycles. You will work closely with other teams to deliver rapid prototypes aswell as production code for which you will ensure high accessibility standardsare upheld. We expect familiarity with modern frameworks and languages, as wellas working practices such as Clean Code, TDD, BDD, continuous integration,continuous delivery, and DevOps.

Key Responsibilities

Defining and developing services and solutions

• Define,design, and develop services and solutions around large data ingestion,storage, and management such as withRDBMS, No SQL DBs, Log Files, Events.
• Define,design, and run robust data pipelines/batch jobs in a productionenvironment.
• Architectinghighly scalable, highly concurrent, and low latency systems

Maintain, support, and enhance current systems.

• Contributeto paying down technical debt and use development approaches that minimizethe growth of new technical debt.
• Contributefeedback to improve the quality, readability, and testability of the codebase within your team.
• Mentorand train other developers in a non-line management capacity.
• Buildtools (One of SBT, Gradle, Maven).
• Ensureall software built is robust and scalable.

Collaborating with Internal and external stakeholders

• Participatingin sprint planning to work with developers and project teams to ensureprojects are deployable and monitorable from the outside.
• Workwith third-party and other internal providers to support a variety ofintegrations.
• Aspart of the team, you may be expected to participate in some of the 2ndline in-house support and Out-of-Hours support rotas.
• Proactivelyadvise on best practices.

To Be The Right Fit, You'll Need

• Degreein Computer Science, Software Engineering or related preferred
• Minimumof 5 years experience in a Big Data
• Adhereand use TDD/BDD.
• Outstandingability to develop efficient, readable, highly optimized/maintainable andclear code.
• HighlyProficient in either Functional Java or Scala, Python
• Experienceof Storing Data in systems such as Hadoop HDFS, ADLS, Event Hubs
• Experienceof designing, setting up and running big data tech stacks such as Hadoop,Azure Databricks, Spark and distributed datastores such as Cassandra,DocumentDBs, MongoDB, Event Hubs
• In-depthknowledge of Hadoop technology ecosystem – HDFS, Spark, Hive, HBase, EventHubs, Flume, Sqoop, Oozie, SPARK, Avro, Parquet
• Experiencedebugging a complex multi-server service.
• Indepth knowledge and experience in IaaS/PaaS solutions (eg AWSInfrastructure hosting and managed services)
• Familiaritywith network protocols - TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, etc.
• Knowledgeof relational and non-relational database systems
• Understandingcontinuous integration and delivery.
• Mocking(any of the following Mockito, ScalaTest Spock, Jasmine, Mocha).
• Buildtools (One of SBT, Gradle, Maven).
• Ensureall software built is robust and scalable.
• Anability to communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience.
• Workingknowledge of unix-like operating systems such as Linux and/or Mac OS X.
• Knowledgeof the git version control system.
• Abilityto quickly research and learn new programming tools and techniques.

Whatweoffer

Webelieveourpeopleareourgreatestadvantage.Wevaluecuriosity,purpose,andthedrivetomakearealdifference.WhenyoujoinAlef,youjoinamission—andateamthat’sjustaspassionateabouttransformingeducationasyouare.

Here’saglimpseofwhatweoffer:

• Annualperformancebonus
• Lifeinsurance
• Enhancedleavepolicy
• Ahybridworkmodelandupto40remoteworkingdaysperyeartoworkfromanywhere(withflexibilitybuiltin)

AtAlef,wedon’tjustimagineabetterfutureforeducation.

Webuildit—together.