Senior Data Platform Engineer (Snowflake, Kafka, AWS)

About the role

A hands-on Senior Data Platform Engineer is sought to support the modernization, migration and reliability of a large-scale production data platform. The role combines data engineering with platform and DevOps operations across Snowflake, Confluent/Kafka and AWS. It is a remote contract engagement of 45 hours per week, with full U.S. Central Standard Time coverage (UTC-6); candidates must be based in an eligible EMEA country approved for sourcing.

Key responsibilities

• Migrate data-platform infrastructure and workloads from legacy environments to modern AWS-based infrastructure, supporting connectivity, deployment and operational prerequisites for workloads moving to AWS us-east-2.
• Enable secure and governed access to data for platform consumers and downstream systems.
• Modernize data-platform architecture, tooling, orchestration, storage and operational practices.
• Operate and migrate Snowflake, Confluent/Kafka, AWS and related infrastructure across development, stage and production environments.
• Troubleshoot production issues, take part in incident response, and contribute to testing, documentation and runbook creation.
• Deliver repeatable, auditable infrastructure changes using Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code practices, GitLab, monitoring and documented change processes.
• Coordinate migration work and technical dependencies across platform, data and consuming teams.

Required profile

• 3+ years of senior-level, hands-on production data-platform engineering experience with a platform or DevOps orientation and strong data experience; enterprise experience strongly preferred.
• Experience operating or migrating production systems across development, stage and production environments.
• Strong production troubleshooting, incident-response, testing, documentation and cross-team communication skills.
• Experience with least-privilege access, change control, secrets handling and secure operational practices.

Required skills

• Strong Python, Bash and SQL skills.
• Production experience with Snowflake, Confluent/Kafka and AWS, with either deep Snowflake and AWS knowledge plus working Kafka knowledge, or deep Kafka/Confluent and AWS knowledge plus working Snowflake knowledge.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code tooling, GitLab and monitoring.
• Nice to have: Apache Spark, Hadoop, Hive or HQL; Snowpark, dbt alternatives, AWS Glue, Monte Carlo; legacy Airflow, Hadoop or Hive migrations; Snowflake-to-Iceberg or Snowflake-to-data-lake patterns.