Member Technical Staff II

At Nielsen, we are passionate about our work to power a better media future for all people by providing powerful insights that drive client decisions and deliver extraordinary results. Our talented, global workforce is dedicated to capturing audience engagement with content - wherever and whenever it’s consumed. Together, we are proudly rooted in our deep legacy as we stand at the forefront of the media revolution. When you join Nielsen, you will join a dynamic team committed to excellence, perseverance, and the ambition to make an impact together. We champion you, because when you succeed, we do too. We enable your best to power our future.

Gracenote is the content business unit of Nielsen that powers the world of media entertainment. Our metadata solutions help media and entertainment companies around the world deliver personalized content search and discovery, connecting audiences with the content they love. We’re at the intersection of people and media entertainment. 

With our cutting-edge technology and solutions, we help audiences easily find TV shows, movies, music and sports across multiple platforms. As the world leader in entertainment data and services, we power the world’s top streaming platforms, cable and satellite TV providers, media companies, consumer electronics manufacturers, music services and automakers to navigate and succeed in the competitive streaming world. Our metadata entertainment solutions have a global footprint of 80+ countries, 100K+ channels and catalogs, 70+ sports and 100M+ music tracks, all across 35 languages.

Job Description

About the Role

We are looking for a highly capable and hands-on Senior Software Engineer to join our Data Ingestion team. In this role, you will be a core contributor responsible for building, optimizing, and maintaining scalable data pipelines and backend systems.

You will work closely with our Lead Engineers and Product Managers to translate technical designs into production-ready code. Because we process high volumes of data, you will be tasked with writing efficient code, troubleshooting performance bottlenecks (CPU/Memory), and ensuring data flows reliably through our ETL pipelines. This is an excellent opportunity for a strong engineer who thrives in an Agile environment and loves solving complex data transfer challenges.

Key Responsibilities

• Core Development: Design, write, test, and deploy clean, scalable code primarily in Java or Python.

• Pipeline Engineering: Build and maintain high-throughput data ingestion workflows, ETL pipelines, and data formatting/analytics processes.

• System Optimization: Actively monitor application performance, troubleshoot memory and CPU consumption issues, and optimize database queries and data transfer bottlenecks.

• Technical Collaboration: Participate heavily in system design discussions, conduct thorough code reviews, and provide constructive feedback to peers.

• Infrastructure & Deployment: Work hands-on with AWS cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes deployments, and CI/CD pipelines to ensure smooth and reliable releases.

• Agile Execution: Actively participate in Scrum ceremonies (sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives) and take ownership of delivering complex features on time.

• Mentorship: Provide guidance and support to junior Software Engineers on the team.

Technical Requirements

Core Backend & Data Engineering:

• Languages: Strong, hands-on proficiency in Java and Python.

• Data & Big Data: Solid experience building ETL pipelines and working with Apache Spark and data formatting/analytics tools.

• Databases: Proficient in designing schemas and writing optimized queries for both SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra) databases.

• Messaging/Queues: Experience integrating and troubleshooting message brokers and event queues (e.g., Kafka, AWS SQS, RabbitMQ).

Cloud & Infrastructure:

• Cloud Platform: Proven experience building and deploying applications on AWS (e.g., S3, EC2, Lambda, RDS).

• DevOps & CI/CD: Experience utilizing deployment pipelines via GitLab or Jenkins.

• Containerization: Practical experience with Docker and deploying/managing applications in Kubernetes (K8s).

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Basic understanding or hands-on exposure to IaC tools (e.g., Terraform, AWS CloudFormation).

Qualifications

• 3 to 6 years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend or data-heavy applications.

• Proven ability to take ownership of complex technical features from development through to production deployment.

• Strong debugging skills and the ability to independently resolve infrastructure and code-level issues.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Additional Information

• Frontend/UI: Basic knowledge of UI development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to interface effectively with frontend systems or build internal dashboards.

• Methodology: Strong understanding of Scrum/Agile development procedures and workflows.

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