Data Engineer, Sr. - Remote US

## About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer, Operations to support the reliability, health, and correctness of production data platforms and pipelines. This role sits within the Data Platform Operations function and focuses on triaging, debugging, monitoring, and resolving issues across data ingestion, orchestration, transformation, and analytics workflows.

You will work hands-on with technologies including Airflow, Spark, dbt, Kafka, and Snowflake or similar platforms. You will partner with Data Platform, Analytics Engineering, DevOps, and downstream data consumers to resolve incidents, improve operational processes, and reduce manual effort through automation.

## Key Responsibilities

• * Build and maintain automation, scripts, and lightweight tools for pipeline triage, data validation, backfills, reprocessing, and quality checks.
• * Improve self-service capabilities and reduce manual operational work.
• * Provide operational support for ingestion and transformation pipelines using Airflow, Spark, dbt, Kafka, Snowflake, or similar technologies.
• * Triage failed jobs, diagnose data issues, perform backfills, and coordinate fixes across ingestion, transformation, and analytics layers.
• * Monitor pipeline health, data freshness, and data quality metrics across medallion architecture layers.
• * Investigate data anomalies, schema drift, and transformation failures.
• * Perform root-cause analysis and implement corrective actions to resolve data incidents.
• * Support schema evolution, data contracts, and downstream data consumers in production environments.
• * Operate and troubleshoot orchestration workflows, including retries, backfills, and dependency management.
• * Serve as a primary point of coordination between Data Platform, Analytics Engineering, and downstream consumers during operational issues.
• * Communicate incident impact, coordinate technical fixes, and help ensure timely resolution.
• * Support reliable and efficient day-to-day operation of production data pipelines.

## Required Qualifications

• * Must reside in the contiguous United States.
• * Must have the necessary documentation to work under an independent contractor agreement.
• * 7+ years of experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or software development.
• * Significant experience operating and supporting production data pipelines.
• * Strong programming skills in Python and SQL.
• * Experience working with at least one major data platform such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or similar.
• * Strong experience troubleshooting and maintaining dbt models and understanding dependencies across bronze, silver, and gold data layers.
• * Experience supporting schema evolution, data contracts, and downstream production consumers.
• * Experience with streaming, distributed computing, or S3-based table formats.
• * Hands-on experience with technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Iceberg, Delta, or Hudi.
• * Experience with schema governance, metadata systems, and data quality frameworks.
• * Hands-on experience operating and debugging orchestration tools such as Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect.
• * Understanding of CI/CD and Docker.
• * At least 2 years of experience with AWS.
• * Strong troubleshooting, problem-solving, and incident-resolution skills.

## Preferred Qualifications

• * Experience participating in on-call rotations or incident response.
• * Previous experience working within a data operations team.
• * Experience with data observability tools.
• * Experience with data catalogs or metadata management platforms.
• * Experience working with healthcare data, including X12 or FHIR.
• * Understanding of authentication and authorization technologies such as OAuth2, JWT, or SSO.

## Skills & Competencies

• * Data Engineering
• * Data Platform Operations
• * Production Data Pipeline Support
• * Python
• * SQL
• * dbt
• * Apache Airflow
• * Apache Spark
• * Kafka
• * Snowflake
• * AWS
• * CI/CD
• * Docker
• * Data Quality
• * Data Governance
• * Schema Management
• * Data Contracts
• * Data Observability
• * Root-Cause Analysis
• * Incident Response
• * Pipeline Monitoring
• * Data Transformation
• * Automation and Scripting

## Education & Experience

• * No specific educational requirement is stated in the source job description.
• * 7+ years of experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or software development is required.
• * Significant production data pipeline operations and support experience is required.
• * At least 2 years of AWS experience is required.

## Work Arrangement & Schedule

• * Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
• * Location: Contiguous United States
• * Employment Type: Independent Contractor
• * Schedule: Full-time, 40 hours per week
• * Working Hours: US Eastern Time office hours
• * Contract: Stable, long-term independent contractor agreement
• * Sponsorship: Not available; H1B, OPT, EAD, and CPT visas are not considered.

## Compensation & Benefits

• * Currency: USD
• * Compensation: Not specified in the source job description.
• * Remote work within the contiguous United States.
• * Stable, long-term independent contractor engagement.

## Recruitment Process

• * Technical Interview: 45 minutes
• * Screening Interview with the Client's Hiring Manager: 30 minutes
• * Client Technical Interview: 45 minutes
• * The recruitment process is designed to move efficiently between stages.

## Compliance / Additional Information

This is a fast-paced, high-pressure operational role with significant exposure to data platforms, analytics engineering, and downstream reporting systems. The position offers the opportunity to develop deep subject-matter expertise across key areas of data platform operations.