Senior Data Engineer

Title: Sr Data Engineer
Location: Jersey City
Length 6+ Months
Open to conversion: Yes


Job Summary:
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Data Engineer with 8+ years of hands-on experience in enterprise data engineering, including deep expertise in Apache Airflow DAG development, dbt Core modeling and implementation, and cloud-native container platforms (Kubernetes / OpenShift).
This role is critical to building, operating, and optimizing scalable data pipelines that support financial and accounting platforms, including enterprise system migrations and high-volume data processing workloads.
The ideal candidate will have extensive hands-on experience in workflow orchestration, data modeling, performance tuning, and distributed workload management in containerized environments.

Key Responsibilities:
Data Pipeline & Orchestration

• Design, develop, and maintain complex Airflow DAGs for batch and event-driven data pipelines
• Implement best practices for DAG performance, dependency management, retries, SLA monitoring, and alerting
• Optimize Airflow scheduler, executor, and worker configurations for high-concurrency workloads

dbt Core & Data Modeling

• Lead dbt Core implementation, including project structure, environments, and CI/CD integration
• Design and maintain robust dbt models (staging, intermediate, marts) following analytics engineering best practices
• Implement dbt tests, documentation, macros, and incremental models to ensure data quality and performance
• Optimize dbt query performance for large-scale datasets and downstream reporting needs

Cloud, Kubernetes & OpenShift

• Deploy and manage data workloads on Kubernetes / OpenShift platforms
• Design strategies for workload distribution, horizontal scaling, and resource optimization
• Configure CPU/memory requests and limits, autoscaling, and pod scheduling for data workloads
• Troubleshoot container-level performance issues and resource contention

Performance & Reliability

• Monitor and tune end-to-end pipeline performance across Airflow, dbt, and data platforms
• Identify bottlenecks in query execution, orchestration, and infrastructure
• Implement observability solutions (logs, metrics, alerts) for proactive issue detection
• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and resiliency of data pipelines

Collaboration & Governance

• Work closely with data architects, platform engineers, and business stakeholders
• Support financial reporting, accounting, and regulatory data use cases
• Enforce data engineering standards, security best practices, and governance policies

Required Skills & Qualifications:
Experience

• 10+ years of professional experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or platform engineering roles
• Proven experience designing and supporting enterprise-scale data platforms in production environments

Must-Have Technical Skills

• Expert-level Apache Airflow (DAG design, scheduling, performance tuning)
• Expert-level dbt Core (data modeling, testing, macros, implementation)
• Strong proficiency in Python for data engineering and automation
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes and/or OpenShift in production environments
• Extensive experience with distributed workload management and performance optimization
• Strong SQL skills for complex transformations and analytics

Cloud & Platform Experience

• Experience running data platforms on cloud environments
• Familiarity with containerized deployments, CI/CD pipelines, and Git-based workflows

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting financial services or accounting platforms
• Exposure to enterprise system migrations (e.g., legacy platform to modern data stack)
• Experience with data warehouses (Oracle)