Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer

Location: 100% Remote (U.S. based) - must work core Eastern Time hours. Candidates based in Eastern or Central time zones only; Mountain and Pacific time zones will not be considered.

Engagement Type: Long-term contract. W2 only

About the Team
Join a passionate, close-knit team supporting a dynamic suite of tools and programs that streamline and expedite the Higher Education recruitment and admissions process. The team is responsibly experimenting with AI to help institutions connect with millions of high school students each year, and prides itself on continuously innovating its products and services. You'll collaborate with a mix of full-time staff and contractors - including three architects and three-plus engineers - across multiple time zones to deliver a range of services and tools.

About the Opportunity
As a Senior Data Engineer, you bring a strong passion for software engineering excellence and a drive to turn that passion into consistent, high-quality product development. You're customer-obsessed, analytically sharp, and thrive working with native AWS services to solve challenging business problems.
You'll partner closely with Product Owners, Architects, Developers, and fellow Engineers to design, define, and implement product features, conduct system-level validation, and verify functionality throughout the development lifecycle. This role sits at the intersection of data engineering, analytics, and quality engineering - you'll build robust data pipelines while also contributing to testing and automation practices that keep the platform resilient and performant.

This role has a strong emphasis on Amazon Redshift - including Redshift Serverless, complex SQL development, and integrating Redshift with the broader AWS data ecosystem.

What You'll Do
Design & Implementation (~70%)

• Build and maintain data pipelines and microservices using AWS services including Redshift, Lambda, S3, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, QuickSight, and OpenSearch
• Write and optimize complex SQL for data extraction, transformation, and reporting
• Create and maintain automated functional and system tests that replicate real-world scenarios
• Develop code and test automation to support security features and technical scoping, ensuring high-quality, reliable feature delivery
• Support continuous integration practices and help the team continuously raise the bar on code quality
• Coordinate with other engineers, architects, UX, and infrastructure teams as needed

• Help implement cloud-first architectural solutions and best practices
• Participate in agile ceremonies - sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily standups, and sprint demos
• Participate in peer reviews of software engineering artifacts

• Mentor team members by developing training materials on current and future product architecture
• Provide constructive feedback on code and design artifacts to technical staff

• Ideally 6+ years of software development experience in a production environment
• Expertise writing and optimizing complex SQL queries (SELECT, JOIN, GROUP BY, HAVING, window functions, etc.)
• Expertise integrating Redshift/Redshift Serverless with AWS services such as S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, DynamoDB, and Kinesis, along with BI tools like Tableau, QuickSight, or Looker for real-time analytics and dashboards
• Expertise building serverless ETL pipelines with Lambda to automate data ingestion and transformation into Redshift
• Required: Python. Nice to have: React and Node.js
• Experience building event-driven, serverless cloud applications on AWS
• Solid technical grounding in cloud computing, DevOps, and microservices architecture
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts into business-friendly language
• Proven ability to build strong working relationships with stakeholders and customers
• Strong analytical, conceptual, and problem-solving skills
• Ability to prioritize and execute effectively in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment