Data Engineering Lead

Rewards Network•Chicago, IL

12d•Hybrid

About The Position

Rewards Network is seeking a Data Engineering Lead to drive their modern data engineering foundation and provide technical leadership across data engineering and data science. The team is in the process of migrating to a modern stack, and this role is crucial for ensuring disciplined execution, architectural clarity, and consistency. The ideal candidate will be a hands-on player-coach, comfortable with building teams and assessing/refactoring the current data infrastructure. Initially, this role will also manage the Data Science team, including prioritization and roadblock removal. This is a hybrid position requiring 3 days a week in the Chicago office.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
6–10 years of experience in data engineering or a closely related discipline
2+ years in a technical lead or staff-level individual contributor role
Familiarity with data science workflows, ML model lifecycle, and MLOps concepts
Expertise in data engineering — including model design, testing strategy, incremental patterns, and layer boundary governance
Experience designing and enforcing data modeling standards in a team environment — not just building models, but establishing the patterns others follow
Demonstrated ability to bring a team along technically — through code review, documentation, mentorship, and setting standards that stick
Familiarity with CI/CD for data pipelines (GitLab or equivalent) — including automated testing, deployment workflows, and environment promotion strategies
Experience with data observability and monitoring — alerting on pipeline failures, data quality degradation, and freshness SLAs (familiarity with tools like Elementary, Monte Carlo, or equivalent)
Strong decision-making under ambiguity — this role requires someone who can move forward with incomplete information and course-correct, not someone who needs consensus to proceed
Clear, direct communicator who can translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders
Technical expertise in: Python, Apache Airflow, Apache Kafka, cloud data warehouses (Redshift, GBQ, Databricks)

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree in a technical field
Experience at a company that has completed a similar legacy-to-modern warehouse migration
Prior experience managing or mentoring data engineers

Responsibilities

Establish and enforce architecture standards that ensure consistent designs that produce repeatable results.
Assess the current state of our data infrastructure — evaluate what needs refactoring, and what should be replaced — then execute on that plan with the team.
Lead the continued build-out of the modern data stack, including ELT pipelines, stream ingestion, transformation logic along with storage and compute — serving as the technical authority when the team needs a decision made.
Hire and develop data engineering talent, grow the team with engineers experienced in modern ELT architectures and develop the existing team members through mentorship, code review, and technical leadership.
Define and maintain the data model RFC process, reviewing proposed changes, enforcing boundary discipline, and ensuring no undocumented changes promote to canonical layers.
Directly lead the data science team, setting priorities, managing workstreams, and translating business problems into clearly scoped DS projects — fostering a culture of accountability, technical rigor, and continuous improvement.
Own data pipeline monitoring and observability, ensuring production pipelines have appropriate alerting, data quality checks, and incident response processes so failures are caught early and resolved quickly.
Provide regular visibility into team progress, architectural decisions, and risks to senior leadership, communicating tradeoffs clearly and escalating when business commitments are at risk.

Benefits

Comprehensive benefits package
Competitive Time Off Benefits: including flexible PTO, 11 company holidays, and parental leave.
Generous dining reimbursement when you dine with our restaurant clients
401(k) plan with a company match
Two medical plan options- Standard PPO or High Deductible Health Plan (HSA with company match for HDHP participants)
Partnership with Rx n Go, offering certain prescriptions for free
Two dental plan options and a vision plan
Flexible Spending Accounts and a pre-tax commuter benefit program
Accident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity Insurance Plans
Short Term and Long Term disability
Company-paid life insurance and AD&D insurance, supplemental employee, spouse, and child life insurance
Employee Life Assistance Program