Senior Data Engineer

Our goal is to help our clients keep moving forward. We work with them to build the skills and capabilities they need to stay ahead of the competition, and we know our success only happens when they succeed. We’re a team of curious, talented people, and we’re committed to making YLD a place where great people want to work, grow, and stay.

We’re a remote-first consultancy specialising in software engineering, product design, and data. Our teams are based across London, Lisbon, and Porto, and we create digital solutions that continue to deliver value long after our work is done.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you’ll be part of a client team building innovative products. We expect you to be curious, passionate, driven, and enthusiastic. You’ll be proficient at problem-solving, and crafting scalable, resilient, and fault‑tolerant architectures. You’ll be an effective communicator and a team player. You and your team will move in a fast‑paced engineering environment, achieving outstanding results and delivering exciting projects.

A YLD Senior Data Engineer is a highly skilled engineer who spans across data engineering and analytics engineering, and knows where the boundaries sit. You've built pipelines and transformation layers. You've inherited messy data projects and made them good. You have opinions about how data teams should work and the humility to adapt them to context.

You have a real passion for the craft and are an active learner who gets excited by the variety that consultancy brings: different clients, different stacks, different problems.

• Delivering data work on client engagements: pipelines, transformation layers, models, and the infrastructure around them
• Adapting to different client contexts, legacy warehouse migrations, greenfield lake houses, struggling transformation layers that need rescuing
• Defining and evolving our internal standards for data work: testing, documentation, project structure, code review
• Mentoring and growing data engineers across the company
• Showing up for client team moments (internal speakers, learning sessions, social events) to build strong working relationships.
• Contributing to proposals and helping shape engagements during the sales process
• Representing YLD externally through writing, speaking, and contributing to the wider data community.

• SQL as engineering:
  You write SQL that's reviewable, testable, and performs  understand query planning, engine quirks, and how materialisation choices affect cost and performance
• Python for data:
  You write typed, testable Python for pipelines and tooling. You've built and maintained production data systems, not just notebooks
• Data modelling:
  You've made deliberate choices between dimensional, Data Vault, normalised, and denormalised designs. You can explain those trade‑offs in terms of flexibility, query performance, and maintainability
• Transformation architecture:
  You design transformations that are idempotent, incremental, and dependency‑aware. You think in DAGs, not scripts
• Pipeline design:
  You understand batch, streaming, and micro‑batch trade‑offs. You consider latency, complexity, cost, and reprocessability. And choose the right approach for the problem
• Data testing:
  You write tests as code, schema contracts, assertions, and transformation logic. You know what to catch at build time vs. defer to observability
• Data observability:
  You treat data reliability like site reliability. Measurable indicators, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis
• CI/CD for data:
  You version, test, and deploy pipelines like software. Environment promotion, rollback strategies, and infrastructure as code for reproducible environments
• Data governance:
  You've implemented lineage, cataloguing, sensitive data classification, or access control. Not just built pipelines, but made them auditable and secure
• Cost-conscious:
  You've optimised warehouse spend, storage strategies, or job efficiency. You treat compute as a resource to manage, not ignore
• Platform fluency:
  You've worked across the modern stack. Orchestration (Airflow,…