Senior Backend Engineer

ListenFirst
Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

Senior Backend Engineer – Data Ingestion & ETL

Company - ListenFirst Media (social media analytics)

Location - Jaipur

Experience - 4–5 years in backend / data engineering

Type - Full-time

About the role

ListenFirst collects social and entertainment data from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X and LinkedIn, then turns it into analytics for brands and media companies. You will own the backend that does this: the ingestion layer that collects the data, and the ETL pipeline that loads it into our Redshift data warehouse every day.

This is a hands-on role on a mature, production system. You will keep it running, fix data issues fast, and modernise it step by step.

What you will do

  • Ingestion: Build and maintain collectors for social platform APIs (Facebook Graph, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn and others). Handle API version changes, rate limits, auth and pagination.
  • ETL: Own the extract-transform step that turns JSON ingest events into warehouse rows. Add new tables, fields and transformations through config, code and tests.
  • Data warehouse: Write and tune Redshift SQL: migrations, views, incremental loads, COPY from S3, compression encodings, WLM and query performance.
  • AWS operations: Run the pipeline on AWS: S3, SQS (priority queues), Kinesis Firehose, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, SNS and EC2 workers. Reprocess data, scale workers and recover failed runs.
  • Data issues: Investigate data gaps and wrong counts raised by Support and Client teams. Find the root cause, fix it and backfill.
  • Modernisation: Upgrade old libraries (e.g. AWS SDK v2 to v3), add tests where they are missing, move secrets out of code, and improve monitoring and alerts.
  • Cost: Help reduce infra cost (Redshift, EC2) without losing data coverage.
  • Team: Write clear docs and runbooks. Review code. Use AI coding tools (Claude Code or similar) in daily work.

Must have

  • 4–5 years of backend or data engineering experience on production systems.
  • Strong in Ruby, or strong in Python/Go and willing to work mainly in Ruby. Our ETL and ingestion code is mostly Ruby.
  • Strong SQL. Hands-on with a columnar warehouse: Amazon Redshift preferred (Snowflake / BigQuery also fine).
  • Built data pipelines that move large volumes: batch loads, incremental loads, deduplication, backfills.
  • Hands-on AWS: S3, SQS, EC2, IAM, CloudWatch. Kinesis or DynamoDB is a plus.
  • Integrated third-party REST APIs: OAuth, rate limits, retries, schema changes.
  • Comfortable on Linux: SSH, bash, cron, logs, process management.
  • Debugs production issues end to end, from a client complaint down to the raw record.
  • Git, code reviews, writing tests (RSpec, pytest or similar).

Good to have

  • Experience with social media platform APIs (Meta Graph API, TikTok, YouTube Data API).
  • Redshift tuning: dist/sort keys, encodings, WLM, RA3 / Serverless.
  • Go or C++ for performance-critical tools.
  • Kafka, Athena, Jenkins or GitHub Actions, Capistrano.
  • Experience modernising a legacy codebase safely.

How we will judge success

  • First 30 days: Set up locally, understand the ingest → ET → Redshift flow, fix first data issue.
  • By 90 days: Own daily ETL runs and recovery. Ship at least one new collector or ETL table end to end.
  • By 6 months: Measurable gains in reliability, test coverage or cost. Become the go-to person for pipeline issues.

Interview focus

  • SQL round: write and optimise warehouse queries; explain an incremental load.
  • Pipeline design: design ingestion for a new social platform API, including failures and backfills.
  • Debugging round: find why a metric dropped, using logs, S3 files and SQL.
  • Code review: review a short Ruby or Python ETL change.

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Questions about this job

How do I apply for the Senior Backend Engineer job at ListenFirst?

Use the apply link on this page: you apply directly with ListenFirst on LinkedIn. Before you do, score your resume against this job description on Fitboard. It shows which skills and keywords the job asks for that your resume doesn't show, so you can fix them first.

What skills does ListenFirst want for this Senior Backend Engineer role?

The job description asks for backend or data engineering, Ruby, Python, Go, SQL, Amazon Redshift, AWS and S3. Make sure your resume shows the ones you have, in the words the job uses: applicant tracking systems look for them.

How can I get a job at ListenFirst?

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Is this Senior Backend Engineer job remote or onsite?

This is based in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

Is it free to apply? Does Fitboard charge anything?

Applying is free: you apply directly with ListenFirst, and this job page and its apply link cost nothing. Checking your resume against this job is free too, with 3 free scans when you sign in and no credit card needed.

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