Senior Data Engineer and Technical Leader

Senior Cloud Engineer

We are seeking an experienced Senior Cloud Engineer to lead the development and operation of our data pipelines. As a hands-on technical leader, you will be responsible for setting the technical direction, running design reviews, and coaching engineers.

You will work across ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and APIs; automate environments with Terraform; instrument observability; and write tests to keep things reliable. Azure experience is preferred, but strong AWS experience is also acceptable.

The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of leadership, including experience in leading engineers or owning large, multi-team projects. You should be comfortable communicating clearly, learning fast, and using AI coding tools effectively without relying on them exclusively.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical leadership: Lead a small squad or workstream; scope milestones; manage dependencies and risks; unblock engineers; communicate status to stakeholders; land outcomes on time.
• Architecture & direction: Define target states and data contracts; make build/buy calls; author RFCs; drive cost/performance guardrails and reliability patterns.
• Data pipelines: Design, build, and operate reliable batch and change-driven pipelines; schedule/orchestrate jobs; handle schema evolution and failures gracefully.
• Transformations & modeling: Implement clean, tested merge/transformation pipelines; produce models that are easy to consume for products and analytics; tune SQL for performance.
• APIs & integration: Build or collaborate on APIs for data access/updates; design request/response contracts; handle auth (OAuth2/OIDC/JWT), idempotency, validation, and auditing.
• Infrastructure & DevOps: Provision/manage cloud resources with Terraform; automate build/test/deploy with CI/CD; write solid shell scripts for glue/ops tasks.
• Observability & reliability: Instrument logs/metrics/traces; define SLOs and on-call runbooks; lead incident reviews and drive root-cause prevention.
• Security & compliance: Apply least-privilege access, secrets management, and encryption in transit/at rest; partner on compliance requirements.
• Quality & standards: Champion unit/integration/data-quality tests (including SQL); enforce code health via reviews, linters, and CI checks.
• Collaboration & docs: Operate async-first; produce concise docs (data contracts, mappings, runbooks, RFCs); collaborate closely with product/engineering/analytics across time zones.

Requirements

• Proven leadership: led engineers or owned large, multi-team projects; comfortable running design reviews and giving actionable feedback.
• Strong SQL (tuning, indexing, query plans) and solid RDBMS fundamentals (e.g., Postgres, SQL Server, MySQL).
• Python for data work and services; comfortable with shell scripting (bash preferred; Powershell acceptable).
• Terraform and IaC fundamentals; CI/CD experience (version control workflows, automated tests, environment promotion).
• Cloud: Azure preferred (storage, compute, identity, monitoring). If not Azure, very strong AWS background.
• Data integration: Ingestion (batch + change-driven), orchestration, schema/versioning, resilient retries/replays.
• Workflow orchestration: Prefect preferred (flows/deployments, retries/backoff, scheduling, observability); Airflow/Dagster also acceptable.
• APIs & auth: REST patterns, pagination, validation, rate limiting, OAuth2/OIDC/JWT.
• Observability: Logs/metrics/traces and actionable alerts/dashboards.
• Testing mindset: Habit of writing tests for code and SQL; fixtures/test data; CI.
• Communication: Clear written/verbal comms; practiced cross-timezone collaboration.
• AI tooling: Ready to use Claude Code (and similar assistants) to accelerate work—while exercising judgment and writing your own code/tests.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation based on experience.
• Flexible schedule with overlap for key meetings across time zones.
• Duration: 10+ months (extension/full-time possible).

How to Apply

Please share:

• Resume/CV highlighting data engineering, DevOps/IaC, and/or API/auth work.
• Brief note (one paragraph) about a recent pipeline/service: requirements, your role, tech, validation/tests, deployment/ops, outcome.
• Links to code samples or design docs (if available/shareable).