Big Data Engineer [L2]

Who we are

Alef Education began with a bold idea: that every learner
deserves a personalised and meaningful education experience. What started in
2016 as a small pilot programme in Abu Dhabi has evolved into one of the
world’s most dynamic EdTech companies—reshaping how millions of students engage
with learning across the globe.

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

Supporting over 1.1 million students and 50,000 teachers
across 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, or
supporting educators with world-class tools, Alef is committed to impact at
scale.

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

About The Role

As a Big Data Engineer you will have a strong understanding
of big data technologies with an exceptional ability to code. You will
provide technical leadership, working closely with the wider team to ensure
high quality code is delivered in line with the project goals and delivery
cycles. You will work closely with other teams to deliver rapid prototypes as
well as production code for which you will ensure high accessibility standards
are upheld. We expect familiarity with modern frameworks and languages, as well
as 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 production
  environment.

• Architecting
  highly scalable, highly concurrent, and low latency systems

Maintain, support, and enhance current systems.

• Contribute
  to paying down technical debt and use development approaches that minimize
  the growth of new technical debt.

• Contribute
  feedback to improve the quality, readability, and testability of the code
  base within your team.

• Mentor
  and train other developers in a non-line management capacity.

• Build
  tools (One of SBT, Gradle, Maven).

• Ensure
  all software built is robust and scalable.

Collaborating with Internal and external stakeholders

• Participating
  in sprint planning to work with developers and project teams to ensure
  projects are deployable and monitorable from the outside.

• Work
  with third-party and other internal providers to support a variety of
  integrations.

• As
  part of the team, you may be expected to participate in some of the 2nd
  line in-house support and Out-of-Hours support rotas. 

• Proactively
  advise on best practices.

To Be The Right Fit, You’ll Need

• Degree
  in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related preferred

• Minimum
  of 5 years experience in a Big Data

• Follow
  Clean Code/Solid principles 

• Adhere
  and use TDD/BDD.

• Outstanding
  ability to develop efficient, readable, highly optimized/maintainable and
  clear code.

• Highly
  Proficient in either Functional Java or Scala, Python

• Knowledge
  of Azure Big Data/Analytics services – ADLS (Azure Data Lake Storage),
  HDInsight, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Fabric,
  Azure Event Hubs, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Databricks

• Experience
  of Storing Data in systems such as Hadoop HDFS, ADLS, Event Hubs

• Experience
  of 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-depth
  knowledge of Hadoop technology ecosystem – HDFS, Spark, Hive, HBase, Event
  Hubs, Flume, Sqoop, Oozie, SPARK, Avro, Parquet
• Experience
  debugging a complex multi-server service.

• In
  depth knowledge and experience in IaaS/PaaS solutions (eg AWS
  Infrastructure hosting and managed services)

• Familiarity
  with network protocols – TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, etc.

• Knowledge
  of relational and non-relational database systems

• Understanding
  continuous integration and delivery.
• Mocking
  (any of the following Mockito, ScalaTest Spock, Jasmine, Mocha).

• IDE
  Intellij or Eclipse.

• Build
  tools (One of SBT, Gradle, Maven).

• Ensure
  all software built is robust and scalable.

• An
  ability to communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience.

• Working
  knowledge of unix-like operating systems such as Linux and/or Mac OS X.

• Knowledge
  of the git version control system.

• Ability
  to quickly research and learn new programming tools and techniques.

What we offer

We believe our people are our greatest advantage. We value curiosity, purpose, and the drive to make a real difference. When you join Alef, you join a mission — and a team that’s just as passionate about transforming education as you are.

Here’s a glimpse of what we offer:

• Annual flight allowance

• Annual performance bonus

• Education allowance

• Life insurance

• Enhanced leave policy

• A hybrid work model and up to 40 remote working days per year to work from anywhere (with flexibility built in)

At Alef, we don’t just imagine a better future for education.

We build it — together.