[Remote] Lead Data Engineer
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Harnham is recruiting for a growing SaaS company focused on analytics and workflow solutions that help organizations turn complex data into actionable insights. The Lead Data Engineer will serve as a hands-on technical leader responsible for designing and evolving data pipelines and architecture, providing technical direction, mentoring engineers, and leading complex initiatives that support customer-facing analytics.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the senior technical leader within the Data Engineering organization
- Provide technical direction around architecture, data modeling, engineering practices, code quality, and complex problem-solving
- Design, build, and maintain scalable and reliable ELT pipelines supporting customer-facing analytics
- Own data modeling, transformations, and onboarding of new data sources
- Lead complex initiatives from architecture and planning through implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing support
- Improve existing systems through automation, scalability, efficiency, reliability, and maintainability
- Troubleshoot customer-facing data issues in partnership with Product, Implementation, Customer Success, Analytics, and Engineering teams
- Establish engineering frameworks and standards around productivity, reliability, observability, and consistency
- Contribute to the technical roadmap and identify opportunities to improve the broader data platform
- Mentor and coach other data engineers
- Evaluate architectural options, clearly communicate tradeoffs, and make technical recommendations
- Help evolve existing data architecture thoughtfully rather than pursuing unnecessary rebuilds or greenfield solutions
Skills
- Work Authorization: U.S. Citizens or Green Card Holders. No sponsorship available
- • 7–10+ years of overall engineering experience, with significant experience in Data Engineering
- • Experience leading or providing technical direction to small engineering teams, approximately 3–8 people
- • Very strong SQL skills
- • Strong Python experience, particularly for data engineering and ELT
- • Strong data modeling experience
- • Experience designing and operating large-scale data ingestion and transformation pipelines
- • Experience with Airflow or a comparable orchestration framework
- • Linux experience
- • Experience working with large datasets and varying data quality
- • Strong understanding of data architecture and architectural tradeoffs
- • Experience improving, modernizing, or migrating existing data architectures
- • Ability to think beyond individual pipelines and understand the broader data platform
- • Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- • A strong technical point of view and the ability to explain why a particular technical approach is appropriate
- Candidates should therefore have demonstrated experience leading small teams or mentoring engineers and be interested in eventually taking on broader leadership responsibility
- • dbt
- • Airflow/Astronomer, Dagster, or similar orchestration technologies
- • PostgreSQL
- • MPP database architectures
- • Experience across multiple database technologies
- • Vertica or similar niche/MPP database experience
- • Healthcare or health-related data experience
- • Experience with financial services, advertising, transactional, or other complex data environments
- • Experience troubleshooting customer-facing data issues
Benefits
- 100% Remote, U.S.
- Potential to move into formal people leadership and team management as the organization grows
Company Overview