[Hiring] Senior Data Platform Engineer @Lifted, an Upwork Company™

Role Description

We are seeking a hands-on Senior Data Platform Engineer to support the modernization, migration, and reliability of a large-scale production data platform. This role combines data engineering with platform and DevOps operations across Snowflake, Confluent/Kafka, and AWS. Enterprise experience strongly preferred.

Key Responsibilities

• Migrate data-platform infrastructure and workloads from legacy environments to modern AWS-based infrastructure.
• Support connectivity, deployment, and operational prerequisites for workloads moving to AWS us-east-2.
• Enable secure and governed access to data for platform consumers and downstream systems.
• Modernize data-platform architecture, tooling, orchestration, storage, and operational practices.
• Operate and migrate Snowflake, Confluent/Kafka, AWS, and related data-platform infrastructure across development, stage, and production environments.
• Troubleshoot production issues and participate in incident response, testing, documentation, and runbook creation.
• Deliver repeatable and auditable infrastructure changes using Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code practices, GitLab, monitoring, and documented change processes.
• Coordinate migration work and technical dependencies across platform, data, and consuming teams.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of senior-level, hands-on production data-platform engineering experience with a platform or DevOps orientation and strong data experience.
• Strong Python, Bash, and SQL skills.
• Production experience with Snowflake, Confluent/Kafka, and AWS through one of two accepted depth profiles:
  • Deep Snowflake and AWS experience with working Kafka knowledge, including topics, connectors, and schemas; or
  • Deep Kafka/Confluent and AWS experience with working Snowflake knowledge.
• Experience operating or migrating production systems across development, stage, and production environments.
• Strong production troubleshooting, incident-response, testing, documentation, and cross-team communication skills.
• Experience with least-privilege access, change control, secrets handling, and secure operational practices.
• Hands-on experience using Terraform or infrastructure as code, GitLab, and monitoring to deliver repeatable and auditable changes.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Apache Spark and Hadoop, Hive, or HQL experience, including modernization or migration of legacy workloads.
• Snowpark, alternatives to dbt, AWS Glue, Monte Carlo, or other data-quality and catalog tools.
• Experience migrating legacy Airflow, Hadoop, or Hive workloads to cloud-native or managed platforms.
• Experience aligning systems and operating practices during a company migration or acquisition.
• Familiarity with Snowflake-to-Iceberg or Snowflake-to-data-lake migration patterns.

Required Tools & Platforms

• Python, Bash, and SQL.
• Snowflake.
• Confluent and Apache Kafka, including topics, connectors, and schemas.
• AWS, including production migration and operations.
• Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• GitLab.
• Production monitoring and incident-response tooling.

Location, Time & Engagement

• Candidates must be based in an eligible EMEA country approved for sourcing.
• Full U.S. Central Standard Time coverage (UTC-6) is required.
• Remote contract engagement for 45 hours per week.
• This is not currently a contract-to-hire opportunity.
• The successful candidate will use a client-provisioned AWS WorkSpace.