The Director of Data Engineering will lead and scale the Data Engineering and Analytics Engineering functions, owning the post-application data platform and its architecture, governance, and operating model. This foundational leadership role ensures best in class engineering standards, helps drive the organization toward a durable, auditable, data-product operating model, and modernizes and expands a Snowflake-centered data stack to include building and operating scalable distributed data processing and real-time streaming systems that support event-driven data products for operational use cases.

The role partners closely with Product, Software Engineering, Data Product Managers, Marketing, Compliance, Finance and Data Science to ensure our data ecosystem is production-grade, scalable, and compliant in a regulated gaming environment.

What You'll Do:

Team Leadership & Organizational Growth

• Lead and grow Data Engineering and Analytics Engineering teams; recruit, mentor, and elevate technical capabilities around distributed data processing, stream processing, and event-driven architectures
• Define ownership models for platform components and data products; set performance and hiring plans.
• Advance engineering standards for deployment: development, testing, documentation, release management, and SLAs.
• Partner with Data Product Managers to define data assets as versioned, documented data products with clear ownership and SLAs.

Platform, Architecture & Engineering Excellence

• Own the administration, reliability, governance, and strategic expansion of the Snowflake-based post-application data platform to operate scalable distributed data processing pipelines capable of handling high-volume event data across both batch and streaming workloads.
• Manage platform governance, access control, security, cost, and capacity planning.
• Standardize DBT deployment methods, promotion workflows, and environment management.
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or similar) for reproducible, auditable infrastructure.
• Deliver monitoring, observability, lineage, and data quality frameworks; enforce traceability and auditability for regulated reporting.
• Own and evolve ingestion and warehouse architecture and transformation frameworks .
• Improve performance, cost efficiency, reliability, and scalability of data transformation and storage layers.
• Define and enforce engineering standards across the data lifecycle and establish SLAs and reliability metrics for critical assets - ensuring all pipelines, transformations, and reporting are auditable and documented for internal and external review

Event-Driven Architecture & Player 360

• Partner with Software Engineering on event messaging, streaming architecture, and ingestion patterns (built on technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Spark Structured Streaming, Flink, or equivalent platforms).
• Lead technical design and development of a unified Player 360 data foundation that integrates transactional, behavioral, and event-level data.
• Align application schema design with downstream analytical, product, and regulatory requirements.
• Balance real-time and batch processing strategies according to business needs and cost/complexity tradeoffs.

What You'll Bring:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related STEM field preferred. Equivalent practical experience will be considered.
• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, with 3+ years of experience in leadership roles. 
• Experience transitioning an organization from private/startup to public company.
• Experience in regulated industries (gaming, fintech, payments, healthcare).
• Prior experience building Player 360 / Customer 360 platforms.
• Deep hands-on experience with Terraform / IaC and production-grade streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, etc.).
• Familiarity with GenAI governance frameworks and scalable AI integration patterns such as Harness Engineering.
• Able to travel occasionally both domestically and internationally. #LI-REMOTE #LI-PROMOTE

About the Role:  

Wrike’s Backend Reliability (BRE) team is the backbone of our backend infrastructure and the guardian of our uptime. Our mission is to achieve and sustain 99.99% availability while building the tools, components, and safety nets that the entire engineering organization relies on. As a Senior / Staff Backend Engineer on this team, you won’t just close tickets - you’ll architect core reliability solutions that shape how Wrike scales, performs, and recovers from failure.

Your Impact:  

• Design, build, and maintain critical reliability components such as HTTP rate limiters, internal DB schema migration tools, circuit breakers, and distributed Redis-based caching.  
• Troubleshoot complex production issues, optimize PostgreSQL usage, and ensure our distributed systems remain performant and stable under high load.  
• Lead preliminary investigations during severe production incidents: identify likely root causes, assess impact, and propose mitigation options. The long-term fixes are then implemented by the owning team, based on your findings.  
• Create scalable, reusable tools and frameworks that help other engineering teams build more resilient services.  
• Leverage AI-powered tools and coding agents to accelerate development, analyze architectures, and automate repetitive or error-prone tasks.  
• Influence reliability best practices across engineering by sharing knowledge, reviewing designs, and setting high technical standards.

Your Qualifications:  

• Strong expertise with Java/JVM, building scalable, high-performance backend systems; open to leveraging other languages when appropriate.  
• Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts, including high availability, CAP theorem, and fault tolerance.  
• Deep experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and key–value / non-relational storages (Redis).  
• Practical experience with containerization and cloud-native environments, including Docker and Kubernetes.  
• Hands-on experience with message brokers such as RabbitMQ or Kafka.  
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervision, using critical thinking to question assumptions and validate your own decisions.  
• Strong written and spoken English skills suitable for collaborating in an international engineering environment.

Standout Qualities:  

• Background in infrastructure engineering or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), including infrastructure-as-code practices.  
• Experience leading technical initiatives, driving cross-team projects, and mentoring other engineers while remaining an individual contributor.  
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring stacks (e.g., Graylog, Zabbix, Grafana) and/or data analytics tools such as BigQuery.  
• A strong interest in how complex systems fail and a track record of designing them to recover gracefully.

Team Dynamics:  

You will join the Backend Reliability (BRE) team, a small, highly specialized, senior group focused solely on Wrike’s reliability. The team operates as an internal “reliability task force,” partnering closely with product and platform engineering teams across the company. You’ll collaborate with other senior engineers who value autonomy, deep technical discussions, and rigorous engineering practices. The culture is ownership-driven: you are trusted to manage your time, make architectural decisions, and drive initiatives to completion.

Our Work Style:  

The BRE team works on core backend and infrastructure services that support millions of users. We operate in a collaborative environment that values clear communication, thoughtful design, and fast feedback loops.  

• Tech focus areas include: Java/JVM-based services, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ/Kafka, and observability/monitoring tools.  
• We encourage the use of modern AI-based tooling and coding agents as part of daily development and troubleshooting workflows.  
• Work is organized with an emphasis on impact and reliability goals rather than ticket volume, giving you room for deep work and long-term improvements.  
• Hybrid work mode (Prague, Czech Republic / Nicosia, Cyprus), with flexibility to balance focused individual work and collaborative sessions.

Why Join Wrike?

• 5 Weeks of paid vacation
• Sick Leave Compensation 
  • 5 Paid Uncertified Sick Days
  • 2 weeks fully paid w/ medical certificate, additional 
  • 4 weeks paid at 80% salary rate
• Parental Leave (fully paid): 18 Weeks Maternity / 4 Week Paternity 
• 2 Volunteer Days
• Meal Vouchers (CZK 220 per working day)
• Annual Prague Travel Card (Lítačka)
• Hybrid Working Model
• Benefit budget with flexible options, including a MultiSport card, Canadian Medical membership, contributions to a pension savings plan and additional choices available through Benefit Plus

What’s next?

• Interview with a Recruiter
• Technical interview
• System Design Interview
• Cultural interview 
  

Your recruitment buddy will be Aleksandar Chernev, Senior Technical Recruiter.

#LI-AC1 

About the Role:  

Wrike’s Backend Reliability (BRE) team is the backbone of our backend infrastructure and the guardian of our uptime. Our mission is to achieve and sustain 99.99% availability while building the tools, components, and safety nets that the entire engineering organization relies on. As a Senior / Staff Backend Engineer on this team, you won’t just close tickets - you’ll architect core reliability solutions that shape how Wrike scales, performs, and recovers from failure.

Your Impact:  

• Design, build, and maintain critical reliability components such as HTTP rate limiters, internal DB schema migration tools, circuit breakers, and distributed Redis-based caching.  
• Troubleshoot complex production issues, optimize PostgreSQL usage, and ensure our distributed systems remain performant and stable under high load.  
• Lead preliminary investigations during severe production incidents: identify likely root causes, assess impact, and propose mitigation options. The long-term fixes are then implemented by the owning team, based on your findings.  
• Create scalable, reusable tools and frameworks that help other engineering teams build more resilient services.  
• Leverage AI-powered tools and coding agents to accelerate development, analyze architectures, and automate repetitive or error-prone tasks.  
• Influence reliability best practices across engineering by sharing knowledge, reviewing designs, and setting high technical standards.

Your Qualifications:  

• Strong expertise with Java/JVM, building scalable, high-performance backend systems; open to leveraging other languages when appropriate.  
• Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts, including high availability, CAP theorem, and fault tolerance.  
• Deep experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and key–value / non-relational storages (Redis).  
• Practical experience with containerization and cloud-native environments, including Docker and Kubernetes.  
• Hands-on experience with message brokers such as RabbitMQ or Kafka.  
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervision, using critical thinking to question assumptions and validate your own decisions.  
• Strong written and spoken English skills suitable for collaborating in an international engineering environment.

Standout Qualities:  

• Background in infrastructure engineering or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), including infrastructure-as-code practices.  
• Experience leading technical initiatives, driving cross-team projects, and mentoring other engineers while remaining an individual contributor.  
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring stacks (e.g., Graylog, Zabbix, Grafana) and/or data analytics tools such as BigQuery.  
• A strong interest in how complex systems fail and a track record of designing them to recover gracefully.

Team Dynamics:  

You will join the Backend Reliability (BRE) team, a small, highly specialized, senior group focused solely on Wrike’s reliability. The team operates as an internal “reliability task force,” partnering closely with product and platform engineering teams across the company. You’ll collaborate with other senior engineers who value autonomy, deep technical discussions, and rigorous engineering practices. The culture is ownership-driven: you are trusted to manage your time, make architectural decisions, and drive initiatives to completion.

Our Work Style:  

The BRE team works on core backend and infrastructure services that support millions of users. We operate in a collaborative environment that values clear communication, thoughtful design, and fast feedback loops.  

• Tech focus areas include: Java/JVM-based services, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ/Kafka, and observability/monitoring tools.  
• We encourage the use of modern AI-based tooling and coding agents as part of daily development and troubleshooting workflows.  
• Work is organized with an emphasis on impact and reliability goals rather than ticket volume, giving you room for deep work and long-term improvements.  
• Hybrid work mode (Prague, Czech Republic / Nicosia, Cyprus), with flexibility to balance focused individual work and collaborative sessions.

Why Join Wrike?

• 25 calendar days of paid vacation
• Sick Leave Compensation (5 Paid Uncertified Sick Days)
• Parental Leave: 18 Weeks Maternity / 4 Week Paternity 
• 2 Volunteer Days
• Medical Insurance (Employees + Dependents)
• Hybrid Working Model
• School Allowance (Up to €600/month for school aged kids)
• Simcard w/ Unlimited Internet Access for active employees
• Office Lunch Allowance (via Wolt) on Wednesdays / Thursdays

What’s next?

• Interview with a Recruiter
• Technical interview
• System Design Interview
• Cultural interview 
  

Your recruitment buddy will be Aleksandar Chernev, Senior Technical Recruiter.

#LI-AC1