At Kpler, we are dedicated to helping our clients navigate complex markets with ease. By simplifying global trade information and providing valuable insights, we empower organisations to make informed decisions in commodities, energy, and maritime sectors.
Since our founding in 2014, we have focused on delivering top-tier intelligence through user-friendly platforms. Our team of over 700 experts from 35+ countries works tirelessly to transform intricate data into actionable strategies, ensuring our clients stay ahead in a dynamic market landscape. Join us to leverage cutting-edge innovation for impactful results and experience unparalleled support on your journey to success.
Join Kpler’s Commodities Tribe as our next Senior Software Engineer and help shape the future of our Supply & Demand products.
Our Supply & Demand platform transforms complex global commodity data-from production sites, trade flows, imports, exports, refinery activity, consumption, and stock changes-into trusted market intelligence used by our clients around the world.
Historically focused on crude oil, our team is now evolving the platform to support a much broader range of commodities, including refined products, biofuels, metals, and beyond. This is a major engineering transformation: building a scalable, reusable platform that can support new commodity markets without creating separate solutions for each product.
As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, you will influence technical direction, solve complex engineering challenges, and help shape the systems behind one of Kpler’s core products. You will work closely with experienced engineers, Product, and Research teams to build solutions that combine strong engineering practices with meaningful business impact.s.
This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys looking beyond individual features-someone who thinks about architecture, product impact, and building systems that stand the test of time.
Your future position:
Lead the technical direction of generalising the S&D data model from crude oil to all commodities, owning the trade-offs between debt, design, reliability and time-to-market as the crew's call.
Evolve the shared ETL Framework (Reader → Transformer → Writer) in `supply-demand-core` into the reusable foundation every commodity vertical builds on, so LNG, grains and new products stop diverging into bespoke pipelines.
Own publication reliability end to end: the anomaly-detection guardrail (`supply-demand-ml`), the release path, and the data-quality bar that decides whether a balance is fit to ship to customers.
Set and raise the non-functional bar (reliability, latency, observability, security, cost) across the crew's Python engine, TypeScript data-distribution APIs and Airflow orchestration.
Shape the external + webapp data-distribution API contract (`supply-demand-oil-api`, `supply-demand-grains-api`) that external clients depend on: versioning, pagination, backward compatibility.
Lead design reviews within the crew and steward the crew's ADRs; bring engineering alignment to ambiguous, business-critical work.
Own the response to critical incidents in the crew's systems, and drive the preventative work that follows so the same class of failure does not recur.
Partner directly with Product and the Research team to shape the crew's technical and feature roadmap, including the SuDeP pipeline that Research consumes.
Mentor mid-level (P3) engineers toward senior scope, and act as a cross-crew technical consultant within the Commodities Tribe and the wider Engineering chapter.
Experience & Background
- Essential:
- 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, with experience delivering production systems.
Experience delivering technically ambiguous, business-critical projects end to end, owning the design, the trade-offs and the production outcome, not just the implementation.
Deep experience building and running data-intensive backends in Python (ETL/orchestration, relational data modelling, SQL/Postgres).
Owning systems in production: on-call, observability, incident response and the prevention work afterwards ("you build it, you run it").
Experience setting technical direction for a team and being the person other engineers consult on hard design decisions.
Desirable:Worked with Airflow (or comparable orchestration) and TypeScript/NestJS APIs, or can credibly ramp into a polyglot Python + TS estate.
Exposure to a real, evolving domain data model: commodities, energy, finance, logistics or another domain where correctness of the model is the product.
Familiarity with data-quality / anomaly-detection approaches, or the discipline of gating publication on quality.
Experience with IaC and GitOps delivery (Terraform, ArgoCD, k8s) and with serving versioned external client APIs.
You take ownership of problems and outcomes, not just individual tasks.
You think beyond the code and understand how engineering decisions impact the product and customers.
You are comfortable making technical decisions, challenging ideas, and helping shape the direction of the team.
You enjoy working on complex problems, learning new things, and adapting in a fast-moving environment.
You collaborate openly with engineers, Product, and Research teams to find the best solutions.
You share knowledge and help the people around you grow.
Skills Required
- 5+ years of experience as a software engineer delivering production systems
- Experience delivering technically ambiguous, business-critical projects end-to-end, owning design and production outcomes
- Deep experience building and running data-intensive backends in Python (ETL/orchestration, relational data modelling)
- Strong SQL and Postgres experience
- Owning systems in production: on-call, observability, incident response and prevention work
- Experience setting technical direction and providing design leadership for other engineers
- Experience with Airflow or comparable orchestration
- Experience with TypeScript / NestJS APIs or ability to ramp into polyglot Python+TS stack
- Exposure to domain data models (commodities, energy, finance, logistics) and data-quality/anomaly-detection approaches
- Familiarity with IaC and GitOps delivery (Terraform, ArgoCD, Kubernetes) and serving versioned external client APIs
What We Do
Kpler is the leading data & analytics firm providing real-time transparency in commodity markets. Relying on a methodology that combines artificial and human intelligence, the Kpler platform provides real-time data and analytics (global flows, storage, freight) on more than 40 commodities including crude oil, refined products, LNG, LPG, and dry bulk.
