[Hiring] Senior Data Engineer @The Descartes

Role Description

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will set the technical direction for a governed, scalable data platform that powers BI, product APIs, ML models, and customer-facing AI assistants. You will lead our shift from ETL to ELT and advance our Data Mesh model, ensuring data products are well-modeled, contract-backed, reliable, and built to scale.

Outcomes — What Success Looks Like

• Lead our ETL-to-ELT migration, moving transformation logic from PySpark pipelines into version-controlled SQL and dbt without disrupting existing consumers.
• Advance Data Mesh, establishing clear domain ownership, enforceable data contracts, safe schema evolution, and self-service governance.
• Own and mature dbt, including model architecture, contracts, testing, lineage, documentation, and CI/CD.
• Strengthen our semantic layer, ensuring critical metrics are consistently defined and delivered at the correct grain across BI, APIs, ML, and AI.
• Improve platform reliability and engineering standards through stronger data quality, observability, testing, security, and production readiness.
• Raise team capability and delivery predictability through technical leadership, mentorship, planning, and AI-assisted development practices.

Qualifications

• Practical Data Mesh experience with domain-owned data products, enforceable contracts, federated governance, and schema evolution.
• Experience implementing ELT, ideally including migration from an existing ETL architecture.
• Deep dbt, SQL, dimensional modeling, and data modeling expertise, including grain, contracts, testing, lineage, and performance optimization.
• Experience with PySpark and cloud data warehouses such as Redshift, Snowflake, or BigQuery.
• Experience building scalable data platforms using technologies such as AWS, S3, Glue, Athena, Airflow/Dagster, Kafka/SQS, Terraform, and CI/CD.
• Strong data quality, testing, security, observability, and production engineering practices.
• Ability to translate business requirements into robust data products and communicate technical trade-offs across Product, Analytics, BI, and Engineering.
• Experience mentoring engineers, setting technical standards, and using AI development tools such as GitHub Copilot or Claude Code.
• Bonus: experience with semantic/metrics layers, ML or LLM data products, BI platforms, or FastAPI.

Requirements

• Smart: Able to quickly understand complex systems, connect ideas, and make sound judgments.
• Curious: Actively seeks to understand customer problems, emerging technologies, and better ways of working.
• Coachable: Open to feedback, willing to adapt, and continuously improving through learning.

Benefits

• Join at an important stage in our data platform's evolution, with meaningful influence over our move to ELT, Data Mesh, and governed data for AI.
• This is a hands-on role with autonomy, visibility across technical and product leadership, and the opportunity to shape architecture and engineering standards while mentoring others.
• Competitive compensation, great benefits, remote and flexible work hours.
• Opportunity to join a company on an awesome mission with a great existing team and trajectory.