Senior Data Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer / Team Lead to architect and implement our critical data infrastructure. This is an individual contributor role focused on solving complex data challenges through technical excellence and innovation.

Are you a highly driven and result-oriented Senior Engineer with hands-on experience in building scalable and high-quality digital products and features? If so, we are looking for someone like you to join our team at Chaos Theory

As a Senior Data Engineer at Chaos Theory, you will be the technical owner of our data pipeline architecture. You will design, build, and maintain robust systems that process real-time sports data, ensuring high reliability and low latency for our betting platform. This role requires deep technical expertise in distributed systems, data engineering, and a strong focus on building scalable, observable infrastructure.

As a Senior Data Engineer you will be responsible for building and maintaining robust systems that process real-time data, working closely with business stakeholders, sports data vendors,  and other engineers to ensure delivering a high reliability and low latency data platform. This role requires deep technical expertise in distributed systems, data engineering, and a strong focus on building scalable, observable infrastructure. We are seeking a results-oriented individual who is also able to coach team members about their area of expertise, helping them grow both professionally and personally. 

At Chaos Theory, we operate at the intersection of sports, entertainment, and cryptocurrency. Your technical leadership will be critical in building the data foundation that powers our growth, and we want you to be able to say, "I am consistently driving results that exceed expectations, and my work is directly contributing to the kind of growth that most companies can only dream of."

If you are a hands-on problem solver with strong project management and communication skills and a buzzword-resistant mindset that prioritizes outcomes above all else, we invite you to apply. Together, let's create user experiences that drive behavior and emotions and contribute to the kind of growth that sets us apart.

Let’s make that happen together.

A Day In The Life

As a Senior Data Engineer at Chaos Theory, your typical day might look like this:

The day begins with a review of overnight system metrics and alerts, pinpointing data pipeline anomalies. Following the resolution of urgent matters, a quick morning stand-up with the squad takes place to prioritize tasks and address roadblocks. Collaboration with business stakeholders is crucial for issue resolution and providing future-proof guidance. Once issues are resolved, the focus shifts to designing new pipelines and enhancing existing data, making things more efficient for testing and debugging, and continuous refactoring for a simplified data landscape. The ultimate goal is to manage a 100x increase in current data volume while ensuring minimal end-to-end data latency.

Throughout the day, you might dive into deep work sessions to complete features, striving for simplicity and agility in your solutions. When you come across difficult details, you'll reach out to business, operations or other colleagues to confirm you have the right facts. For a technically challenging part you reach out to a colleague who has more expertise in the area. After just half an hour of pairing on the problem, you feel confident to finish up the rest of the task and make a pull request for your peers to review within the hour. 

Before the day ends, you'll have a 1:1 session with your line manager for feedback and presenting your architecture/design proposal. Explain the trade-offs of various approaches and your selected solution. Integrate feedback to make the design robust against upstream changes. Use this time to discuss your quarterly goals and the support needed to achieve them. This review occurs during a technical design review. Later, you'll engage in an engineering sharing session. With a colleague, briefly detail a customer engineering problem and share the challenges encountered and solutions developed that day.

Your passion for collaboration and technical expertise will be crucial to your success in this role. You're in control, and together with your team, you'll tackle the challenges ahead and help Chaos Theory continue to thrive.

To succeed in this role, you’ll need:

• Strong desire to understand the needs of the users, with the ability to turn insight into action.
• Strong project management and communication skills with the ability to collaborate across cross-functional teams.
• Ability to confidently make technical decisions in the best interests of users and the business.
• Ability to turn complex ideas into simple solutions.
• Strong detail orientation around reading 3rd party API documentation and specifications
• Strong knowledge and hands-on experience of designing well defined interfaces (APIs, schemas and data models)
• Strong desire to develop automations dealing with 3rd party anomalies and data inconsistencies
• Hands-on experience working with business operations in designing input systems to triage non-automatable data inconsistencies, we’re using cadence/temporal.io workflows for long running business processes requiring human input.
• Proactivity in developing new channels for data acquisition and tooling (additional sources for scores, metadata, odds, fixtures etc.)
• Strong desire to build highly testable data pipelines with time series replay functionality on multiple environments
• Strong desire to build a data architecture where the leaf interfaces with 3rd parties can be outsourced into low trust environments while a command and control infrastructure of such leaf nodes resides on our side.
• Hands-on experience with observable data flows and tracing to detect and debug issues early
• Hands-on experience with low latency requirements in distributed microservice architectures.
• Hands-on experience with relational databases such as SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Knowledge of message queues, we’re using RabbitMQ, NATS and Google Pubsub.
• Openness to be On-call to work with the team in triaging issues
• A buzzword-resistant mindset that prioritizes outcomes above all else.
• Fluency in English (verbal and written).

It’d be great — but not necessary — if you also had:

• Knowledge around warehousing data, real-time data processing systems and event-driven architectures
• Knowledge around dealing with TBs of 3rd party data and streamlining debugging
• Ambition to experiment and integrate cutting edge pattern recognition and other AI tools where it would make sense in order to extract insights, detect anomalies, etc.
• Knowledge of fault tolerant engineering practices.
• Knowledge of instrumentation and monitoring, we’re primarily using Datadog.
• Interest in sports, gaming, and cryptocurrencies.
• Hands-on experience mentoring peers.

You will be responsible for:

• Work with solution engineers of third party vendors
• Read and integrate APIs and technical specifications
• Document architectural decisions (e.g. following ADR standard) before starting integrations and coordinate with the team and documenting requirements
• Working closely with product and business operations to support data needs for end customers and input and triage systems for back office support
• Collaborating with stakeholders and the engineering team to create and execute ambitious roadmaps that meet user needs and business objectives.
• Working alongside a team of engineers where you are mentoring team members and peers to ensure we’re continuously learning and sharing knowledge and solutions.

In exchange, we offer:

• A dynamic, collaborative, fun, yet challenging work environment.
• Attractive salary and benefits.
• Premium health insurance for you and your dependents
• Flexible working hours.
• An office located in the heart of Central, Hong Kong. Remote workers will be considered. 
• A state-of-the-art entertaining floor, including a fully stocked bar and pantry, gaming consoles, and a growing library.
• A team of 70 globally, representing over 20 countries — we’re multi-cultural and proud of it!
• Onsite company gym/yoga studio with showers, changing rooms, and free daily classes.
• Expensed weekly team lunches a monthly entertainment allowance, and an annual professional development stipend.
• Company events, including Christmas and Summer parties and our much-loved beach BBQs.

Where you’ll work:

Based out of five floors of office, gym, yoga studio, and entertainment space in Hong Kong’s SoHo district, we work with colleagues around the world to shake things up in one of the most exciting places on the internet today — the digital center of sports, entertainment, and cryptocurrency.

We’d love to have you in Hong Kong or a nearby time zone, but the right person could work anywhere.