Platform Interaction Data Engineer

About bol

Bol is the largest online retailer in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Position

How do you make our customers happy?
Working in the Platform Interaction Data team, you help bol to understand how our millions of customers interact with our e-commerce platform. What was a user’s customer journey? Where did they click? How did they get to a page? We have built a platform to help answer these questions. Now we are looking for an engineer (with data experience) to help us improve it!

What do you do as a PID (Platform Interaction Data) Engineer?
In this role, you maintain and innovate on our big data platform. Our analytics platform is a central data source for our website and app. On one side we provide our analysts and data science teams with behavioural data about our customer this enabled the various development teams to experiment and see the impact of the changes they have made. You will make sure that data keeps flowing into the platform in near real-time and arrives in one piece at all our real-time and batch processes. The interaction data is at the core of a lot of decisions, so it is a big responsibility to do this in an awesome way. You make sure that the data is trustworthy as well as easy to interpret and use.

We maintain and develop JVM applications in Java and Kotlin, as well as using Python to describe our ETL processing steps. Deep dives into our BigQuery datasets are done using SQL.
Due to the complexity, breadth and dependencies of the platform, the role has a bit of a learning curve. But we have your backwith a full onboarding program and a great team to make sure that you will be up to speed in no time.

During your first few weeks, we expect no more (and no less) of you than getting to know your colleagues, getting to know our way of working (hint: aligned autonomy) and getting up close & personal with bol technical environment.

Once you have familiarized yourself with the setting and tooling, you join our and is the first responder to any critical production issues in our systems. You are part of a team of 4+ experienced developers.

What technologies do we use?
We have some components that still run in our Data Centre. The rest of the platform is running in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

As for the tooling, we use:

• Java/Kotlin
• Docker and Kubernetes
• Apache Airflow for ETL
• Apache Flink as our streaming framework
• Apache Kafka as our streaming platform
• BigQuery for Data Storage and Exploration
• Gitlab (managing Git and the CI/CD Pipelines that run there)

Do not worry if you are not familiar with all the above – we will make sure you get up to speed. Most importantly, we are curious to what you can bring to improve our systems!

Current topics and challenges include:

• Making our self-service data platform easier to use for analysts and Data Scientists
• Supporting our tooling in our own Data Centre and GCP
• Migrating our current solutions and services from our own Data Centre to GCP
• Investigate ways to support experimental releases, such as canary releases, to provide a better deployment experience for our developers.
• Make sure that all the user interactions are measured
• Manage and maintain CICD pipelines

Your qualification

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

Why it's for me?

• You are eager to help

You want to deliver a platform towards the organization that is central to understanding our customers with amounts of data that most engineers would run from.

• You love simplicity

Sure, our platform should adhere to guidelines and be compliant, but you always go for simplicity: you understand that developers should be able to deliver their solutions and services as easily as possible. Tooling should work intuitively. Period.

• You look at clouds

We are migrating towards GCP, and you are a main driver of that transition.

Why it's not for me?

• You are a Data nOOb

If you never worked with Data at scale, this might not be your ideal position.

• You are a single-speed bike

Nothing wrong with those (great for city commutes!), but to make the most of this role requires extra gears. Bol changes fast, and you need to thrive in a fluent environment.

• You do not care about sharing

You lock knowledge and insights away in a safe. And throw away the key.

What we offer

• On and off

At bol we understand like no other that you have to take care of yourself first, then your environment and then bol. In that order. Therefore, everyone at bol receives 29 days of vacation.

• The culture and the office

Our colleagues work hard to make the daily lives of our customers easier and more fun. But of course, we do this in an inspiring and creative environment!

• The new flexible working

We bring the best of both worlds together by working 50% at the office and 50% at home. This way, we find a balance between organisational and individual needs.

Discover all perks

Additional details

Your application process

• Your application - Carefully, we take a look at your application. You will hear from us soon to let you know if we invite you for an interview
• First contact - We’ll contact you to walk you through the process and take the first step to set up an interview. And since we’re already talking: feel free to ask any questions you may have
• First date - During the first interview we’ll get to know each other. We want to find out more about you, your work experience and skills
• Your next interview - Before this interview will take please we will ask you to take an online HR assessment and a technical assessment. We’ll also discuss the position and the team in depth 
• Is this love? - Two interviews are usually enough to see if it’s a match. And if you agree… well, it’s the beautiful beginning of your career at bol