Senior Data Engineer

Thanks

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Thanks is building a customer-first monetisation platform that delivers growth without compromise – for advertisers, publishers, and customers. We’re operating at scale today, and entering a phase where data reliability, performance, and intelligence are critical to everything we do. We’re hiring a Senior Data Engineer to build our data foundations from the ground up. This is our first dedicated data engineering hire; a senior individual contributor who will design and deliver the data architecture, models and products that will scale the success of Thanks. This role is deeply hands-on, highly influential, and foundational to the future of our engineering and product organisation.

Requirements

• Experience operating as a senior, hands-on individual contributor in high-growth environments – able to build for scale without over-engineering too early
• Deep strength in both data engineering and applied data science – equally comfortable writing production-grade Python and complex, performance-optimised SQL
• Experience building and operating data pipelines in cloud environments
• Hands-on experience with analytical databases and comfort working across both operational and analytical data stores
• Familiarity with streaming or event-driven data architectures
• Comfortable operating as a senior IC in a greenfield environment – balancing long-term direction with hands-on delivery
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner effectively across Product, Engineering, and Commercial teams
• Uses AI thoughtfully to augment exploration, modelling, and engineering workflows – accelerating experimentation, debugging, and analysis, while maintaining high standards for data quality, correctness, and ownership
• Strong internal drive – you care deeply about performance, correctness, and building systems that last

Nice To Haves

• Experience in adtech, marketplaces, or performance-driven platforms
• Exposure to experimentation frameworks and attribution models
• Experience enabling analytics for non-technical teams
• Data Catalog / Feature Store: Databricks Unity Catalog, Atlas (nice to have)
• Event Streaming: Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent (nice to have)
• Data Analytics / Reporting: Experience working on or supporting reporting functions such as Tableau, Power BI, Superset, etc. (nice to have)
• Data QA: Great Expectations, DBT testing, etc (nice to have)

Responsibilities

• Build the data platform: Design and deliver a scalable platform that serves as the primary engine for the Thanks Network. You’ll move us beyond operational databases into a well-modeled environment that supports both business intelligence and high-scale feature engineering.
• Own the models: You won’t just move data; you will own the data science, technical implementation and performance of our ranking systems. You’ll be responsible for the models that determine how we prioritise, personalise and deliver content across the network.
• Build for real-time inference: Own the end-to-end lifecycle of our models – from training and validation to real-time inference. You’ll ensure our ranking system is fast, reliable, and fed by high-quality, near-real-time data.
• Unlock model experimentation: You will build the framework that allows us to run experiments on our ranking systems, ensuring we can accurately measure lift, attribution, and model success.
• Own pipelines & observability: Build robust batch and near-real-time pipelines that are resilient and observable. You’ll ensure that the data feeding our models and experimentation frameworks is flawless.
• Enable self–serve analytics: Design clean, trusted datasets and data marts that allow product, engineering, and commercial teams to answer their own questions without bottlenecks.
• Set the data direction: Be opinionated about tooling, architecture, and trade-offs – helping define what to build, what to buy, and what to retire as our data needs evolve.
• Lead through expertise: Act as the go-to expert for data across the business, influencing roadmaps and decisions through strong technical judgment rather than formal authority.

Benefits

• Attractive compensation: Including meaningful equity.
• Flexibility with intent: We’re Sydney-headquartered and value in-person collaboration. That said, we care more about leadership, impact, and outcomes than rigid rules – and we’re open to exceptional candidates across Australia’s east coast.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed