Senior Data Engineer
Location: Hybrid in Oak Park Heights, MN (3 days onsite per week) – 6-month contract with potential to extend or convert.
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to serve as the technical leader and engineering anchor for modern data platform initiatives. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who can design scalable solutions, influence technical direction, and partner closely with architects, product teams, and distributed engineering teams. This is not a tool-focused role—we are looking for an engineer with strong architectural thinking who understands how to build reliable, scalable data solutions from the ground up.
The ideal candidate is a senior engineer who thinks like an architect. You understand not only how to build solutions, but why they should be built a certain way. You can evaluate tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and guide teams toward scalable, maintainable outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and development of enterprise-scale data pipelines and data products
- Partner with architects and engineering teams to establish and enforce data engineering best practices
- Drive technical decisions around data ingestion, transformation, modeling, and delivery
- Design scalable, resilient, and high-performing solutions across the full data lifecycle
- Collaborate with both onshore and offshore teams, providing technical leadership and mentorship
- Influence delivery teams on implementation approaches, standards, and engineering quality
- Optimize performance, reliability, governance, and operational excellence across the data platform
Requirements
- 8+ years of Data Engineering experience
- Strong expertise with Snowflake
- Experience building and optimizing complex data pipelines at scale
- Advanced SQL and data modeling skills
- Strong programming experience with Python and/or Spark
- Experience designing data architectures and scalable engineering frameworks
- Ability to lead technical discussions and influence engineering teams
- Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills
- Experience working with distributed or offshore engineering teams
Preferred Qualifications
- dbt
- Fivetran or similar enterprise data ingestion frameworks
- Azure services including: Azure DevOps (ADO), Azure Blob Storage, Azure Functions
- Metadata-driven or configuration-driven pipeline development
- Data Vault, Dimensional Modeling, or Star Schema design
- Data governance, observability, and DataOps practices
- Building data foundations that support AI/ML use cases
What We're Looking For
- Design solutions, not just implement requirements
- Influence technical direction and engineering standards
- Communicate effectively with engineers, architects, and business stakeholders
- Balance hands-on delivery with technical leadership
Pay
$62–$67/hour, dependent on skills and qualifications.
Schedule
Hybrid: 3 days onsite each week in Oak Park Heights, MN.