Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Cars & Bids is the fastest-growing online auction platform for enthusiast vehicles and is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to support their data stack on a part-time retainer basis. The role involves managing the full data lifecycle, ensuring data quality, and creating reliable data products for business use.
Responsibilities
- The full data lifecycle: ingestion (Hevo/OpenFlow), warehousing (Snowflake), transformation (tasks and dynamic tables), light modeling and batch inference, and reverse ETL into our operational tools
- Turn business questions into trustworthy data products that downstream users — both humans and AI — can rely on without second-guessing
- Build and maintain the bespoke and SaaS-based syncs that move modeled data from Snowflake into the tools where the business operates (HubSpot CRM, Iterable/Braze, support tools, and others as we grow)
- Keep our feature pipelines fresh, our models trained, and our inference flowing to where it creates business value
- Navigate ambiguity and make two-way-door decisions quickly using data
- Make pragmatic build-vs-buy calls and resist tool sprawl. Complexity is a choice, and we choose less of it
- Maintain Snowflake cost discipline — warehouse sizing, query performance, and refresh cadences are your responsibility
- Strategically take on good tech-debt and pay it down when business-justified
- Investigate data quality issues and remediate them at the root
- Join our team syncs when necessary to align on priorities, surface ideas, and propose solutions
Skills
- Snowflake practitioner — you have strong opinions about warehouse design, query optimization, dynamic tables, tasks, and cost management
- Experience owning data ingestion in production (OpenFlow, NiFi, Fivetran, Airbyte, or equivalent flow-based or managed ingestion tools)
- Comfort with the full analytics engineering workflow: modeling, testing, documentation, and exposing trustworthy datasets to downstream consumers
- Experience building and maintaining reverse ETL syncs, both bespoke (API integrations, stored procedures) and via SaaS tools (Hightouch, Census, native CDP integrations)
- Working knowledge of MLOps fundamentals: keeping training pipelines running, feature tables fresh, and batch inference flowing reliably. You don't need to be an ML researcher, but you need to be the person who keeps models in production healthy
- Proficiency in SQL and Python
- Proven experience as the only data person on a team, or clear evidence you'd thrive without a peer in your domain
- Detail-oriented with excellent analytical and communication skills, including the ability to explain data tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders
- Full professional proficiency in English
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related quantitative field, or equivalent experience
- 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 that makes those workflows reliable
- Experience in marketplace, e-commerce, or auction businesses
Company Overview