Senior Data Engineer - Contractor
About The Position
Cars & Bids is seeking an experienced Senior Data Engineer for a fractional/contract role on a monthly retainer basis. This individual will be responsible for supporting the entire data stack, from ingestion through warehousing, transformation, modeling, and reverse ETL. The role involves turning business questions into trustworthy data products, building and maintaining data syncs into operational tools, keeping feature pipelines fresh, and managing Snowflake cost discipline. The ideal candidate will be the sole dedicated data practitioner, comfortable navigating ambiguity and making pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions.
Requirements
- Snowflake practitioner with strong opinions on warehouse design, query optimization, dynamic tables, tasks, and cost management.
- Experience owning data ingestion in production (OpenFlow, NiFi, Fivetran, Airbyte, or equivalent).
- Comfort with the full analytics engineering workflow: modeling, testing, documentation, and exposing trustworthy datasets.
- Experience building and maintaining reverse ETL syncs (bespoke and SaaS tools like Hightouch, Census).
- Working knowledge of MLOps fundamentals: keeping training pipelines running, feature tables fresh, and batch inference flowing reliably.
- Proficiency in SQL and Python.
- Proven experience as the only data person on a team, or clear evidence of thriving without a peer.
- Detail-oriented with excellent analytical and communication skills, including explaining data tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
- Full professional proficiency in English.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related quantitative field, or equivalent experience.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Snowpark, Cortex, or similar in-warehouse ML capabilities.
- Experience supporting AI-driven analytics workflows (business users querying data via LLMs) and the modeling discipline required.
- Experience in marketplace, e-commerce, or auction businesses.
Responsibilities
- Support the full data lifecycle: ingestion (Hevo/OpenFlow), warehousing (Snowflake), transformation (tasks and dynamic tables), light modeling and batch inference, and reverse ETL into operational tools.
- Turn business questions into trustworthy data products that downstream users can rely on.
- Build and maintain bespoke and SaaS-based syncs to move modeled data from Snowflake into operational tools (HubSpot CRM, Iterable/Braze, support tools, etc.).
- Keep feature pipelines fresh, models trained, and inference flowing to create business value.
- Navigate ambiguity and make quick, data-driven decisions.
- Make pragmatic build-vs-buy calls and resist tool sprawl.
- Maintain Snowflake cost discipline, including warehouse sizing, query performance, and refresh cadences.
- Strategically take on and pay down tech debt when business-justified.
- Investigate and remediate data quality issues at the root.
- Join team syncs as necessary to align on priorities, surface ideas, and propose solutions.
Benefits
- This is not a W-2 or employee role, and it does not include company benefits or equity.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Part-time
Career Level
Senior
