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Senior Data Engineer

Summary

Senior Data Engineer builds and maintains secure enterprise data pipelines for large-scale digital transformation projects in customs, defense, and healthcare, using Spark, SQL, and modern data architecture.

About the project and the role

We are supporting an important project led by a global company that specializes in digital transformation. The goal is to build a secure enterprise data platform, often compared to a "French Palantir"-style solution.

You will join a small team of 10–15 experienced experts and work directly with project leaders on large Data & AI initiatives across Europe. These projects support areas such as customs, national defense, and healthcare, and are worth many millions of euros.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will design, build, and maintain data pipelines. Your work will help collect, process, and deliver high-quality data for business intelligence, APIs, data science, and machine learning applications.

Key responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain ETL/ELT data pipelines.

  • Connect different data sources, including internal systems, APIs, databases, files, IoT devices, and logs.

  • Develop data processing solutions using Spark, SQL, or similar technologies.

  • Organize data using Bronze, Silver, and Gold data layers.

  • Improve pipeline performance, scalability, and infrastructure costs.

  • Create automated data quality checks for freshness, completeness, and schema validation.

  • Handle failed data loads, retries, and data reprocessing.

  • Support data governance by contributing to data contracts and certification rules.

  • Use Git for version control and automate deployments with CI/CD.

  • Document datasets and metadata.

  • Monitor data pipelines, solve incidents, and support business continuity.

Technical requirements

Required

  • At least 5 years of experience as a Data Engineer.

  • Strong SQL skills, including query optimization and data modeling.

  • Experience with distributed processing tools such as Spark, Flink, or similar.

  • Experience with workflow orchestration tools like Airflow, Dagster, or similar.

  • Good knowledge of data formats such as Parquet, Avro, and ORC.

  • Experience with analytical data modeling, including star schemas and wide tables.

Nice to have

  • Experience with streaming and Change Data Capture (CDC) technologies such as Kafka, Pulsar, or Debezium.

  • Knowledge of analytics engineering tools like dbt.

  • Experience with data quality testing and pipeline monitoring.

  • Good understanding of Git and CI/CD practices.

Additional skills

  • Ability to balance data volume, processing speed, and infrastructure costs.

  • Strong understanding of the Data-as-a-Product approach.

  • Good communication skills in French and English to work with BI teams, Data Scientists, and business stakeholders.

  • Careful, reliable, and focused on delivering stable production systems.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Success in this role will be measured by:

  • Time needed to deliver usable datasets from raw data.

  • Pipeline reliability, processing speed, and latency.

  • Number of data-related incidents.

  • Processing and infrastructure cost efficiency.

  • How easily datasets can be reused by different teams.

See also