Production operation of Spark on Kubernetes: Operator or spark-submit, driver and executor pod templates, S3A and Delta Lake jar configuration, dynamic allocation, executor sizing, shuffle and spill management, MinIO committers, and Prometheus/JMX monitoring; this is the primary filter for this role.Operator-managed PostgreSQL with DBA-adjacent depth: CloudNativePG, Zalando or Crunchy; autovacuum and memory tuning; TimescaleDB and PostGIS; pgBackRest or Barman restores; postgres_exporter monitoring.Production operation of MinIO in distributed mode: erasure coding, bucket policies, OIDC via Keycloak, and Prometheus metrics.Kubernetes at the application layer: operators, Helm, GitOps (Argo CD or Flux), offline packaging, storage (Longhorn or Rook), NetworkPolicies and RBAC; cluster administration is not required.6+ years of backend engineering in production, 3+ on data-intensive systems; Python at senior level, SQL at expert level, Java at working level; Git at expert level.Eligibility to obtain and maintain the required national or NATO security clearance for this role (we support candidates through the clearance process).If you meet most of the requirements above, we encourage you to apply. The security clearance eligibility requirement is not flexible.
The following experience is particularly valuable given the live production environment; any two of the items below move a candidate to the top of the list:
Kafka producers and consumers with schema management; Airflow or comparable orchestration; Scala sufficient to read Spark source and stack traces.Air-gapped delivery with Zarf or signed offline bundles; STIG-hardened hosts and FIPS-mode library knowledge; Docker Swarm migration experience; remote shuffle services and shuffle-heavy job tuning.Also valued, and not required:
JupyterHub, MLflow or vLLM model serving; Go for operators or CLI tooling; Ansible or Terraform; Iceberg or Hudi lakehouse formats.Experience in defence or another regulated industry; professional working proficiency in Dutch or French.Build Your Future with ILIAS
Why ILIAS Solutions
ILIAS Solutions is part of the Patria Group and builds software that defence organisations use to sustain operational readiness. The constraints are hard: air-gapped environments, long-lived deployments, hardware you cannot always reach. The engineering has to be right because the alternative is a system that fails without anyone present to fix it.
You will work in a Backend Engineers chapter within a product engineering tribe, with ownership that extends from design through production operation, and the expectation that the chapter's standards improve durably as a result of your presence.
Practicalities
Location: ILIAS Solutions, Diegem, Belgium. Permanent, full-time position.
Actual compensation will be determined based on factors such as skills, experience, qualification and internal equity and can ultimately be more or less than the posted salary range.*Eligibility
Because 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 apply
Send your application through the vacancy page. Questions before you apply? Reach out to Tim van Dam at tim.van.dam@ilias-solutions.com, happy to tell you more about the role and the process, including what the clearance process involves in practice.
