Senior Data Platform Engineer — Diegem, Belgium

Hybrid (2 days on-site) · Permanent, full-timeAbout the roleWhen a warship cuts its last network link, or a forward air base goes dark, your platform still has to work. At ILIAS Solutions, you will engineer the data infrastructure, built on Python, Spark, MinIO, PostgreSQL and lakehouse table formats, that naval and air defence operators depend on in air-gapped, shipboard and disconnected environments. What you'll do

• Keep the production data stack and the backend services built on top of it reliable and observable in production.
• Define and document deployment patterns, backup procedures and tested recovery runbooks that customer teams can execute independently.
• Instrument the full stack, Spark drivers and executors, PostgreSQL, MinIO and the JVM, with metrics, logs, health checks and clear failure diagnostics.
• Embed security constraints into platform design and address security findings before each release.
• Validate releases across HTTP/HTTPS and FIPS/non-FIPS environments, keeping CI/CD quality gates rigorous and release behaviour predictable.

What success looks likeAt six months, a customer team in an isolated environment has deployed or recovered the platform without escalating to ILIAS, and the post-incident review shows the failure surfaced through instrumentation rather than a user report.
At twelve months, FIPS and non-FIPS validation is a routine gate, not a release risk, and the runbooks you have written are the authoritative reference, not you.What you bring

• Eligibility to obtain and maintain the required national or NATO security clearance for this role (we support candidates through the clearance process).
• Production-depth Python and Spark: you own and operate runtimes, not just write jobs against them.
• Hands-on experience with object storage such as MinIO or S3-compatible stores, and lakehouse table formats such as Iceberg or Hudi.
• Operational PostgreSQL knowledge: backup, recovery, diagnosability and schema management under constraints.
• CI/CD and quality gates, rigour around releases, independent of platform; containerised development in deployment contexts.
• Degree in computer science or software engineering, or equivalent professional experience, the or-equivalent clause is genuine.
• Clear written and verbal communication with both engineers and product stakeholders; you will own design and runbook decisions and explain them.

The clearance eligibility line and production Python/Spark depth are not flexible.Nice to have

• Air-gapped delivery experience: offline install bundles, signed packages or tooling such as Zarf; STIG-hardened hosts or FIPS-validated crypto library constraints.
• Kafka, Airflow or comparable streaming/orchestration; Scala sufficient to read Spark source and stack traces; Docker Swarm migration experience.
• Constrained-hardware deployments: single-node or few-node clusters, edge or shipboard scheduling, remote shuffle services and shuffle-heavy job tuning.

Why ILIAS SolutionsThis role carries full end-to-end ownership of a data platform runtime that most platform engineers encounter only in parts: from lakehouse storage and Spark execution through PostgreSQL operations, security hardening and FIPS validation, all the way to the runbooks a customer team uses when you are not in the room. The deployment contexts, shipboard, air-gapped, disconnected forward bases, are technically demanding and genuinely rare. You will have the autonomy to make design decisions that hold up in environments where there is no fallback to a cloud provider and no option to escalate.EligibilityBecause of the nature of our work, this role may require eligibility under applicable export-control regulations and the ability to obtain national or NATO security clearance. We assess eligibility lawfully and on a role-by-role basis; specific requirements are discussed during the selection process. We do not exclude candidates on the basis of nationality except where mandated by applicable export-control or security-clearance law.How to applyApply via this page. Questions before you apply? Reach out to Tim van Dam at tim.van.dam@ilias-solutions.com.