Data Lead

In the last year at Loka, our engineering teams have helped clients advance the world’s #1 AI reading tutor, eliminate $1B in food waste and develop novel drugs for fighting cancer. To cap it off, at the end of 2024 Loka was recognized by AWS as Innovation Partner of the Year, outshining 150,000 partners for the title. And we did it all while enjoying every other Friday off 😎

We use modern technologies to support an incredible variety of meaningful projects while proving work-life balance isn’t a catchphrase, it’s our culture.

Join our team to feed your desire to grow, build with the latest tools and collaborate on projects that you can be proud of.

The Role

• Build scalable production-grade data pipelines and real-time data streams.
• Lead technical projects through architecture, design, implementation and rollout, setting standards and best practices for the team.
• Design and build highly scalable, highly available, cloud-ready applications.
• Be well-versed in ETL design, implementation and maintenance
• Collaborate with Machine Learning, Data Science, Design, Software Engineering and Business teams to triage data or ETL issues
• Define and implement data quality checks, tests and monitoring to maintain high standards of code, schema and data integrity.
• Monitor and analyze data flowing through pipelines and platforms, building appropriate dashboards, alerts and observability tooling.
• Manage a team of data engineers and assist them with project guidance and career development.

Technical Requirements

• At least 2 years of experience managing a team and more than 4 years of experience in a Data Engineering or similar role
• Experienced with stakeholder management
• Advanced level of Python and SQL for building data pipelines, transformations and analytics tooling
• Strong experience in ETL/ET design, implementation and maintenance across batch and/or streaming workloads
• Prior working hands-on experience in one of the three Cloud Providers (AWS, GCP or Azure) to deliver data-centric product experiences
• Fundamental understanding and work experience of in-memory and disk-based databases, relational and nonrelational databases, full-text search engines, database design, development and maintenance
• Experience with data warehousing concepts, dimensional/columnar modeling and modern warehouse/lakehouse patterns
• Working knowledge in data lake, data warehouse and massive parallel processing.
• Solid problem-solving skills and the ability to work through ambiguity, incomplete specifications and evolving requirements

Preferred but Not Required

• Working knowledge of core security and reliability concepts: IAM, federated authentication, SSO/SAML, encryption, network/security best practices, backup and disaster recovery
• Strong experience with distributed systems for large-scale data processing and analytics
• Experience with Spark for large-scale and interactive data manipulation
• Experience with open table/lakehouse formats (e.g. Apache Hudi, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Databricks) and their role in modern data platforms
• Experience with infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines for data and infrastructure changes
• Experience with BI and data visualization tools (e.g. QuickSight, Looker, Tableau) for building dashboards and monitoring

Personality Profile

• Curious: You desire to learn and grow in different industries utilizing a modern tech stack.
• Autonomous: You thrive in a fully remote, globally distributed team.
• Collaborative: You enjoy working as part of a team.
• Adaptable: You operate with a startup mindset and move at a startup pace.
• Dependable: You can be trusted to deliver high-quality work.

Benefits

• Every other Friday off. 26 extra days off a year. Our team calls it a life-changing benefit. We think you’ll agree.
• 100% remote-first. We want you to have the flexibility to work where you feel most comfortable and productive.
• Explore program. Spend 3 months living in Portugal, Colombia, or Macedonia, paid for by Loka.
• Relo program. Permanently relocate yourself, your family and your pet to one of our European headquarters.
• LokaLabs™. Use moonshot technologies to solve overlooked societal challenges in our internal incubator.
• Paid vacation days, sick days and local holidays
• Mental health benefits. Premium subscriptions to support the mental health of every Lokal.

Please submit your CV in English.