Data Engineering Lead
About The Position
The Data Engineering Lead is responsible for driving the modern data engineering foundation at Rewards Network while providing technical leadership across both data engineering and data science functions. The team is mid-migration —actively building on a modern stack— and this role exists to ensure disciplined execution, enforce architectural clarity and consistency. The right person is a hands-on player-coach that is comfortable building teams as we invest in building out this competency as a core pillar of our long-term competitive advantage and strategy. That means assessing the current in-flight build and making deliberate decisions about what to keep and what to replace. Initially, the Data Engineering Lead will also manage the Data Science team, including acting as a key resource to the team, prioritizing work, and clearing roadblocks. This is a hybrid position that requires in office presence 3 days a week (Tuesday-Thursday) in Chicago.
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
- Hybrid working environment in a new office space downtown near the Metra Train stations and catered lunches on Tuesdays.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
