Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. YLD is a remote-first consultancy specializing in software engineering, product design, and data. They are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to build innovative products and deliver data work on client engagements, while mentoring other data engineers and contributing to internal standards and proposals.
Responsibilities
- Delivering data work on client engagements: pipelines, transformation layers, models, and the infrastructure around them
- Adapting to different client contexts, legacy warehouse migrations, greenfield lakehouses, struggling transformation layers that need rescuing
- Defining and evolving our internal standards for data work: testing, documentation, project structure, code review
- Mentoring and growing data engineers across the company
- Showing up for client team moments (internal speakers, learning sessions, social events) to build strong working relationships
- Contributing to proposals and helping shape engagements during the sales process
- Representing YLD externally through writing, speaking, and contributing to the wider data community
Skills
- SQL as engineering: You write SQL that's reviewable, testable, and performs at scale. You understand query planning, engine quirks, and how materialisation choices affect cost and performance
- Python for data: You write typed, testable Python for pipelines and tooling. You've built and maintained production data systems, not just notebooks
- Data modelling: You've made deliberate choices between dimensional, Data Vault, normalised, and denormalised designs. You can explain those trade-offs in terms of flexibility, query performance, and maintainability
- Transformation architecture: You design transformations that are idempotent, incremental, and dependency-aware. You think in DAGs, not scripts
- Pipeline design: You understand batch, streaming, and micro-batch trade-offs. You consider latency, complexity, cost, and reprocessability. And choose the right approach for the problem
- Data testing: You write tests as code, schema contracts, assertions, and transformation logic. You know what to catch at build time vs. defer to observability
- Data observability: You treat data reliability like site reliability. Measurable indicators, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis
- CI/CD for data: You version, test, and deploy pipelines like software. Environment promotion, rollback strategies, and infrastructure as code for reproducible environments
- Data governance: You've implemented lineage, cataloguing, sensitive data classification, or access control. Not just built pipelines, but made them auditable and secure
- Cost-conscious: You've optimised warehouse spend, storage strategies, or job efficiency. You treat compute as a resource to manage, not ignore
- Platform fluency: You've worked across the modern stack. Orchestration (Airflow, Dagster), warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks), ingestion (Fivetran, Airbyte, custom), and transformation (dbt, Spark)
- Cross-functional fluency: You translate engineering constraints into business terms and negotiate realistic commitments
- Self-motivated and proactive
- Comfortable with ambiguity, experimentation, and iteration
- Collaborative by default. You work well in teams and across teams
- Analytical and detail-oriented in your approach to problems
- Comfortable context-switching across clients, stacks, and problem types
- Willing to shape engagements, not just deliver them: contributing to proposals, scoping, and client relationships
- Active in the wider data community: writing, speaking, or open-source contribution
- Genuinely committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion
Benefits
- Company Private Health care
- Enhanced fully paid maternity and paternity leave for up to 6 months
- Company’s Pension Scheme (UK Only)
- 25 days annual holiday (excluding Public Holidays)
- £2000/€2000 annual allowance for Training/Conferences
- £300/€300 annual allowance for additional hardware
- Wellbeing & Performance Support via Oli including Therapy and Coaching
- Discretionary Bonus (depending on Company performance and results)
- Company laptop
- Generous referral schemes
- Remote-first working environment, with flexible working and work–life balance as standard for all employees
Company Overview