Senior Data Engineer (AI Data Platform)

Applaudo Studios

4d

About The Position

This is a 6-month temporary opportunity with the possibility of extension. The role involves solving hard production problems, taking ownership of complex data platforms end to end, diagnosing bottlenecks, refactoring, and shipping improvements that hold up under real production load. The focus is on optimization work such as making queries faster, pipelines leaner, and warehouses more efficient, with a measurable impact. The engineer will operate independently within an established architecture, partnering with architects and fellow engineers. The role emphasizes outcomes, clean data, reliable pipelines, and high-performing systems.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a Data Engineer, with a demonstrated record of independently building, optimizing, and owning production-scale data platforms.
• Proven experience refactoring live schemas and executing safe, production-grade data migrations.
• Hands-on experience consolidating and deduplicating data within a Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold).
• Strong Snowflake expertise, including query profiling, performance tuning, warehouse sizing, clustering, and cost optimization.
• Solid dbt experience, including model design, incremental models, materializations, and testing.
• Experience developing and refactoring Airflow DAGs and operating pipelines in production.
• Advanced SQL skills with a strong track record of diagnosing and resolving production performance issues.
• Working proficiency in Python for data engineering tasks.
• Experience with Git and CI/CD practices in a production environment.
• Comfortable working with undocumented or evolving pipelines and schemas, and bringing structure to them.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain technical decisions and trade-offs.
• Upper-Intermediate to Advanced English proficiency (B2+/C1) for technical discussions.

Nice To Haves

• Snowflake SnowPro certification.
• dbt Analytics Engineering certification.
• Experience with data lineage tools such as Monte Carlo, OpenLineage, or dbt Docs.
• Exposure to BI or semantic layer tools.
• Experience with CDC or streaming data pipelines.
• Experience supporting data platforms behind AI, LLM, or conversational products.

Responsibilities

• Refactor existing schemas and tables to remove duplication and improve consistency within the Medallion Architecture.
• Optimize and reorganize Airflow pipelines for reliability and performance.
• Build, maintain, and improve dbt models that power downstream analytics and product features.
• Implement aggregation and pre-computation strategies to improve dashboard and chat response times.
• Profile and tune Snowflake query performance to support a responsive, production-scale platform.
• Improve overall warehouse efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
• Implement data quality testing and validation to catch issues before they reach production.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production data issues, owning fixes through to resolution.
• Take end-to-end ownership of the solutions you deliver, from implementation through production stability.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree