The Role
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Attribution & Events team, you will be the driving force behind the platform that proves campaign performance. You will own the design, delivery, and reliability of high-stakes data systems that solve the hardest cross-device identity challenges, surgically linking purchases with customers who saw an ad. This mission is absolutely critical to the performance of our ML and overall campaign effectiveness. Get ready to master data at an epic scale, managing datasets with billions of records and trillions of data points across identity resolution, attribution, incrementality measurement, and campaign management.
This role is heavily weighted toward big data engineering, analytical SQL, and OLAP systems (primarily ClickHouse), with backend service work in C# / .NET and Java to operationalize the data products you build.
You'll navigate ambiguity and make the critical tradeoffs that drive system performance and engineering effectiveness — and you'll do it as part of the founding Vancouver engineering team, helping us set the technical bar and shape the culture of a new hub from day one.
Your Impact
In this role, success is measured by the reliability, scalability, and performance of our event data platform. You will:
- Lead Technical Design: Own end-to-end delivery of high-volume data services — from ClickHouse schema and partitioning to ingestion pipelines to the C# services on top — accounting for scalability, failure modes, and cost up front.
- Build & Scale the Data Backbone: Architect ClickHouse-backed pipelines that ingest, store, and query billions of ad events (impressions, conversions, identity signals). Own loaders, partitioning, materialized views, and query optimization end-to-end.
- Operationalize via Backend Services: Build C# / .NET Core 8 services that power attribution, incrementality measurement, and campaign management on top of the data layer.
- Integrate Identity & Event Sources: Ingest events from LiveRamp, pixels, CTV, and IP-based signals; integrate identity graphs and resolve cross-vendor IDs at scale.
- Elevate Reliability: Identify bottlenecks across the data path, improve observability (ingestion lag, query latency, data quality), lead blameless post-mortems, and implement long-term systemic fixes.
- Drive Engineering Excellence: Strengthen the team through high-quality code and SQL reviews, mentorship, and strong design docs, data models, and query patterns.
- Navigate Ambiguity: Make strong calls on the open questions, balancing long-term data architecture health with development velocity.
- Collaborate on Direction: Partner with Product, Science, and Engineering to align technical work with measurement and business priorities.
Required Experience & Capabilities
- Big Data & OLAP: Deep hands-on experience with a columnar/OLAP store (ClickHouse strongly preferred; Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or other petabyte scale big data experience acceptable). Experience designing schemas, tuning queries, and operating at billion-row scale.
- SQL Fluency: Advanced SQL experience including partitioning strategies, large-scale joins, window functions, materialized views, query tuning, and cost-aware analytical patterns.
- High-Throughput Event Systems: Experience building pipelines handling millions to billions of events per day, including ingestion, deduplication, late-arriving data, and backfills.
- Backend Proficiency: Strong programming skills in C# / .NET Core (DI, hosted services, ASP.NET Web APIs) or comparable backend stack with ability to ramp quickly. Comfortable owning services end-to-end (schema, migrations, deploys, on-call).
- Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS experience (S3, SSM/Parameter Store, IAM basics).
- Engineering Discipline: Strong testing mindset with integration tests against real databases; improves infrastructure rather than working around it.
- Operational Mindset: Strong understanding of reliability, observability, and maintainable system design for data pipelines and analytical systems.
- Ownership: Ability to independently drive technical initiatives from problem definition to deployment.
- Communication: Able to clearly explain technical tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Nice to Have Experience
- Ad-tech experience (RTB, DSP/SSP, attribution, incrementality, identity graphs, LiveRamp, IAB standards)
Salary: $150,000 - $190,000 CAD Base Salary + Equity
- Medical, Dental and Vision plan for US employees & Extended Health Benefits for Canadian employees
- 12 weeks paid parental leave + 4 weeks WFH
- Unlimited PTO + Work-From-Anywhere August
- Career development with clear advancement paths
- Equity for all employees
- Hybrid work model & daily team lunch
- Health & wellness stipend + cell phone reimbursement
- 401(k) & RRSP with employer match
- Parking (CA, WA, Vancouver offices) & pre-tax commuter benefits
- Employee Assistance Program
- Comprehensive onboarding (Cognitiv University)
- …and more!
- Festiv – We make work fun with cross-team games, events, and creative team bonding.
- Responsiv – You’ll be close to clients and leadership, influencing real outcomes.
- Inclusiv – Diversity and individuality are celebrated across all levels.
- Inventiv – We reward curiosity and embrace bold ideas.
- Transformativ – We support your growth with training, mentorship, and flexibility.
- Collaborativ – We operate across coasts, connected by purpose and teamwork.
Skills Required
- Experience with big data and OLAP systems
- Advanced SQL experience with analytics and tuning
- Experience building high-throughput event systems
- Proficiency in C# and .NET Core
- AWS experience
- Strong testing and operational mindset
- Ability to drive technical initiatives
- Strong communication skills
What We Do
Cognitiv is a deep learning advertising company redefining how brands connect with consumers. Since 2015, we have built a custom AI platform that predicts consumer behavior in real time and drives performance at scale. Advertisers can activate through their preferred DSP, our managed service DSP, or our industry-first ContextGPT product. By combining advanced data science with flexible activation, we deliver precision, relevance, and measurable impact across channels.
Why Work With Us
At Cognitiv, you will work on real-world AI that directly shapes media performance. We are profitable, growing, and deeply technical, with close access to leadership and clients. We value curiosity, collaboration, and ownership, and we invest in your growth through equity, flexibility, and clear career paths.
