Senior Data Engineer (Foundations)

The Senior Data Engineer - Platform Foundation is a hands-on, senior-level contributor embedded in the Foundations squad. You will design, build, and evolve the shared ingestion platform that underpins data delivery across the company. The platform is the product - your job is to make it reliable, extensible, and easy for other teams to adopt.

The Foundations squad operates across three pillars: simplifying the overall data platform landscape by reducing complexity and consolidating redundant patterns; enabling structured and unstructured data ingestion at scale; and supporting the exposure of data products to consumers across the organization. You contribute to all three - making architectural decisions, writing production code, and enabling other teams through documentation and hands-on support.

Key Responsibilities:

Platform Foundation Development

• Design and implement reusable ingestion components using dlt and dbt-core, covering both structured and unstructured data sources, handling high-volume, append-heavy, and schema-drifting patterns

• Own the Airflow platform end-to-end: extend and maintain DAGs and shared operators, handle deployments and version upgrades, and provide hands-on support to consuming teams

• Ensure incremental loading strategies, data quality checks, and lineage metadata are first-class outputs of every pipeline

Platform Simplification & Architecture

• Identify and eliminate redundant ingestion patterns across consuming teams, drive standardization onto shared Platform Foundation components

• Collaborate with Solution Architects to evolve the platform architecture in response to new data sources and shifting business requirements

• Support data product exposure: define and implement governed interfaces that make data reliably accessible to internal consumers

• Contribute to Terraform-managed infrastructure; participate in multi-cloud (AWS / Azure) deployment patterns

AI Tooling & Developer Productivity

• Actively use and evaluate AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, etc.) to accelerate platform Foundation delivery

• Champion AI tooling adoption within the squad; share best practices and guardrails around AI-generated code review

• Explore AI-powered capabilities (RAG pipelines, LLM-assisted data cataloguing) for internal platform documentation and self-service enablement

DevOps & Reliability

• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines (TeamCity, GitHub Actions) for platform Foundation components

• Define and enforce observability standards: DAG/Task-level alerting, SLA tracking

• Participate in on-call rotation for critical ingestion pipelines; drive post-incident improvements

Team Enablement & Stakeholder Management

• Produce platform Foundation documentation, runbooks, and enablement materials for consuming squads

• Translate ambiguous or moving business requirements into concrete technical designs - comfortable challenging scope when needed

• Mentor mid-level engineers; participate in hiring and technical assessments

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Data/Analytics, Computer Science, or related field

• Minimum 5 years in data engineering roles, with at least 2 years in a senior / platform-level position

• Proven track record building production ingestion and transformation pipelines at scale

• Experience contributing to a shared platform or internal developer tooling consumed by multiple teams

Core Technical Skills:

• Python: idiomatic, testable, production-grade code - not just scripting

• dbt-core: advanced modelling (custom materializations), testing, documentation, packages

• Apache Airflow: DAG design patterns, custom operators, dynamic task mapping, SLA management

• Cloud data platforms: comfortable with one or more major cloud warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric)

• SQL: complex analytical queries, window functions, query profiling

• Git, CI/CD: trunk-based development, automated testing gates, pipeline-as-code

AI & Modern Tooling:

• Daily user of AI coding assistants (Copilot, Claude Code or equivalent)

• Understands the limits of AI-generated code - applies rigorous review, not blind trust

• Interest in LLM-powered data tooling (RAG pipelines, Cortex, semantic layers) is a plus