Data Engineer

Overview

Position: Data Engineer
Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid 3x in office)
Employment Type: Contract-to-hire
Contract Duration: 1-2 years

• Designs, develops, optimizes, and maintains data architecture and pipelines that adhere to ELT principles and business goals.
• Solves complex data problems to deliver insights that help the business achieve its goals.
• Creates data products for engineers, analysts, and data scientists to accelerate their productivity.
• Engineers effective features for modeling in close collaboration with data scientists and businesses.
• Leads the evaluation, implementation and deployment of emerging tools and processes for analytics data engineering to improve team productivity and solution quality.
• Partners with machine learning engineers, BI, and solutions architects to develop technical architectures for strategic enterprise projects and initiatives.
• Fosters a culture of sharing, reuse, design for scale, stability, and operational efficiency of data and analytical solutions.
• Advises, consults, mentors, and coaches other data and analytic professionals on data standards and practices.
• Develops and delivers communication and education plans on analytic data engineering capabilities, standards, and processes.
• Learns about machine learning, data science, computer vision, artificial intelligence, statistics, and applied mathematics as necessary to carry out the role effectively.

• Experience in building data pipelines and deploying/maintaining them following modern data engineering best practices; target tech stack includes Python (PySpark, pandas, Dash); knowledge of SQL; DBT is a plus.
• Experience with designing and maintaining data warehouses and/or data lakes with big data technologies such as Spark/Databricks, or distributed databases like Redshift and Snowflake; experience housing, accessing, and transforming data in relational databases.
• Strong understanding of agile methodologies and experience as a Data Engineer on a cross-functional agile team.
• Software engineering fundamentals and tooling (Git, CI/CD, JIRA) with familiarity with Linux and Bash/Z shell.
• Experience with cloud database technologies (e.g., Azure) and developing solutions on cloud computing services and infrastructure in the data and analytics space.
• Basic familiarity with BI tools (e.g., Alteryx, Tableau, Power BI, Looker).
• Experience working in data engineering or data architecture roles.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, statistics, engineering, or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience as a Data Engineer, preferably in a large organization.

• Focused on agile delivery with a “fail-fast, succeed early” mindset and measurable outcomes.
• Flexibility to adapt to changes in work direction as the project evolves according to highest-priority business needs.
• Strong work ethic; ability to work at an abstract level and gain consensus.
• Exemplary organizational skills with attention to detail, accessibility, and quality assurance.
• Excellent communication and listening skills, collaborating closely with multidisciplinary team members.
• Have a “can do” attitude and thrive on a “test and learn” mentality.