Lead Data Engineer / International Project - Milan hybrid
Summary
Lead a data engineering team to build and scale AI-driven pipelines for a fintech startup, using GCP, Python, and LLM-based enrichment to analyze financial data.
Lead Data Engineer — Freelance / International Project - Milan hybrid
We're looking for a Lead Data Engineer to join an international project via Shakers, a platform connecting top freelance tech talent with companies worldwide.
You'll be joining an AI-driven fintech scale-up redefining how banks, funds, and advisory firms analyze companies through semantic search and LLM-based enrichment, as a foundational member, architecting and scaling the data infrastructure from the ground up.
What you\'ll do
- Deep dive into the existing data landscape (GCP, Python, Cloud Run, Postgres) and identify bottlenecks and architectural improvements
- Design and build scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines handling heterogeneous sources (web scraping, PDFs, structured data) and LLM-based transformers
- Own critical decisions on data technologies, architecture, quality, governance, and security
- Become the technical reference point for data engineering, mentoring team members and scaling the function
- Drive hiring and align the data engineering roadmap with company objectives
Must-haves
- 3+ years in data engineering (5+ preferred), with a proven track record building and maintaining data solutions
- Strong ETL and data warehousing expertise
- Advanced Python for data processing, scripting, and automation
- Strong hands-on GCP experience (Cloud Run, BigQuery, Dataflow)
- Expertise in PostgreSQL (schema design, query optimization, administration)
- Experience with LLM/ML pipelines (data prep, feature engineering, model deployment)
- Experience leading/scaling data engineering teams
- Familiarity with data governance and security best practices
- Terraform / Infrastructure as Code
- Startup mindset
Hybrid Milan | Freelance | Long-term project with strong renewal visibility