Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Social Media Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires a talented and innovative Social Media Engineer to join our growing Marketing Technology team. In this pivotal role, you will be the architect behind our social media data ecosystem. You'll design, build, and maintain the scalable systems that ingest, process, and analyze vast amounts of data from platforms like TikTok, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and more. This is not a content creation role; it's a deep, technical position for an engineer who is passionate about building the backbone of a data-driven social media strategy and empowering our marketing and analytics teams with robust tools and actionable insights.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Data Engineer
Software Engineer (Backend)
Analytics Engineer
Marketing Analyst (with strong coding skills)

Advancement To:

Senior Social Media Engineer
Staff Engineer (Marketing Technology)
Data Engineering Manager
Analytics Engineering Lead

Lateral Moves:

Data Scientist
Product Manager (MarTech)
Solutions Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, build, and maintain resilient, scalable data pipelines to ingest high-volume data from various social media platform APIs (e.g., X, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn).
Develop and deploy robust ETL/ELT processes to clean, transform, and structure raw social media data into analysis-ready formats within our data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery).
Architect and manage data models optimized for social media analytics, ensuring data integrity, accuracy, and efficient querying by downstream users and applications.
Build custom tools, microservices, and automation scripts to support the social media team's operational needs, such as advanced scheduling, performance monitoring, and competitor tracking.
Develop and maintain internal APIs that expose curated social media data and functionalities to other teams and systems across the organization.
Collaborate with data scientists to productionize machine learning models for applications like sentiment analysis, topic modeling, audience segmentation, and trend detection.
Create and automate performance dashboards and reporting solutions using BI tools (e.g., Tableau, Looker) to provide actionable insights to marketing and leadership stakeholders.
Own the technical integration of third-party marketing and social media analytics tools (e.g., Sprinklr, Brandwatch) into our existing data stack.
Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance and cost of social media data infrastructure, including pipelines, databases, and processing jobs.
Stay at the forefront of changes to social media platform APIs, terms of service, and data privacy regulations, proactively adapting our systems to ensure compliance and functionality.
Implement comprehensive data quality checks and alerting mechanisms to ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of our social media datasets.
Partner with the security and legal teams to implement data governance and privacy-by-design principles for all social data handling processes.
Engineer solutions for A/B testing and experimentation on social platforms, enabling data-driven optimization of content and campaign strategies.
Develop systems for real-time monitoring of brand mentions, social trends, and crisis situations, providing timely alerts to relevant teams.
Build infrastructure to handle and process large volumes of unstructured data, including text, images, and video, from social media sources.
Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code, adhering to software engineering best practices and participating in code reviews.
Automate the collection of competitive intelligence data from social channels to benchmark our performance and identify market opportunities.
Build proof-of-concept applications and tools to explore new opportunities for leveraging social data and technology to achieve business goals.
Act as the technical subject matter expert for all things related to social media data, platforms, and their underlying technologies.
Mentor junior engineers and analysts, sharing knowledge and best practices for working with social media data and systems.
Manage and orchestrate complex data workflows using tools like Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect to ensure timely and reliable data delivery.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis on social media trends and campaign performance.
Contribute to the organization's broader data strategy and technology roadmap, particularly within the marketing domain.
Collaborate with business units, including Marketing, PR, and Product, to translate their data needs into concrete engineering requirements.
Participate actively in sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospective ceremonies within the agile data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Advanced Python Proficiency: Deep expertise in Python for data manipulation (Pandas, NumPy), application development (Flask/FastAPI), and interacting with REST/GraphQL APIs.
Expert SQL Skills: Ability to write complex, highly-optimized SQL queries for data transformation, aggregation, and analysis in a data warehouse environment.
Cloud Computing: Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including services for data storage, computing, and serverless functions.
Data Warehousing: Proven experience with modern cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, or Amazon Redshift.
Data Pipeline & Orchestration: Expertise in building and managing data pipelines using tools such as Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or cloud-native equivalents.
Social Media APIs: Demonstrable experience working directly with the APIs of major social media platforms (Meta, X/Twitter, TikTok, etc.).
Containerization & CI/CD: Proficiency with Docker and familiarity with CI/CD principles and tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions) for automating deployment.
Data Modeling: Strong understanding of data modeling concepts and experience designing schemas for analytical workloads.
Big Data Technologies (Preferred): Familiarity with distributed computing frameworks like Apache Spark is a strong plus.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Experience with tools like Terraform or CloudFormation for managing cloud resources.
Business Intelligence (BI) Tools: Experience developing dashboards and reports in tools like Tableau, Looker, or Power BI.

Soft Skills

Analytical Problem-Solving: Ability to deconstruct complex business problems and design elegant, scalable technical solutions.
Strong Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
Collaboration & Teamwork: A proactive and collaborative mindset, eager to work cross-functionally with marketing, analytics, and product teams.
Business Acumen: A keen interest in understanding the business impact of your work and how social media drives growth.
Adaptability & Curiosity: Thrives in a fast-paced environment and possesses a strong desire to learn new technologies and stay updated on social media trends.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's Degree in a quantitative or technical field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Data Science & Analytics
Software Engineering
Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3-7 years of professional experience in a data-centric engineering role.

Preferred:

Demonstrated experience in a data engineering, backend engineering, or marketing technology role with a portfolio of relevant projects. Experience specifically building solutions around social media or marketing data is highly desirable.