Senior Data Engineer (Contract) [HR208] (PK)

Smart Working is dedicated to creating a work environment where your role feels as fulfilling as it looks on paper. This opportunity goes beyond traditional remote jobs by fostering a genuine community that prioritizes your personal and professional growth, no matter your location. Our mission is to eliminate geographic barriers by connecting talented professionals with exceptional global teams for full-time, long-term positions. Join one of the highest-rated workplaces on Glassdoor and thrive in a truly remote-first culture.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in building and scaling the data infrastructure that supports an AI platform designed to automate operations for property management businesses. Your work will involve designing real-time data pipelines, analytics systems, vector databases, and machine learning data workflows to ensure robust, scalable, and reliable data solutions. Collaborating closely with AI, backend, product, and leadership teams, you will help shape the platform’s data architecture and engineering standards. As the first senior data hire, you will define the data function, establish best practices, and contribute to team growth as the company expands.

Key Responsibilities
- Architect and develop scalable data pipelines and infrastructure to support AI and product systems.
- Design and maintain data ingestion, transformation, and storage architectures for both operational and AI workloads.
- Build and manage batch and real-time data pipelines.
- Develop and optimize systems for vector search, retrieval, and machine learning data workflows.
- Ensure data reliability, security, and governance across the platform.
- Collaborate with AI and backend engineering teams to support training, inference, and product feature development.
- Implement monitoring, observability, and data quality frameworks.
- Optimize performance for large-scale datasets and query systems.
- Contribute to technical architecture decisions and long-term data strategy.
- Serve as the founding data hire by defining culture, standards, and hiring criteria for the data team.
- Partner directly with founders and product leadership to translate data capabilities into strategic product decisions.

Required Qualifications
- Over 7 years of professional experience, primarily in dedicated data engineering roles.
- Proven expertise in designing and building data pipelines and distributed data systems.
- Strong experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL; MySQL or similar is acceptable.
- Experience working with NoSQL databases.
- Familiarity with vector databases used in modern AI systems.
- Proficient programming skills in Python.
- Demonstrated ability to make and justify architectural decisions independently.
- Experience building scalable backend systems.
- Skilled in designing data models and storage architectures.
- Deep understanding of data processing performance and optimization.
- Experience with data frameworks and infrastructure technologies such as Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, Kafka, and Elasticsearch or OpenSearch is highly desirable.
- Knowledge of relevant database technologies including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and vector databases like Qdrant, Milvus, or pgvector is highly desirable.
- Experience with Python data-processing libraries such as Pandas or Polars is a plus.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
- Experience working on AI or machine learning platforms.
- Familiarity with stream processing and event-driven architectures.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure.
- Background in high-growth startups or early-stage companies.

Please note that artificial intelligence tools may be used to assist in reviewing applications and analyzing resumes during the hiring process. These tools support but do not replace human judgment, and all final hiring decisions are made by our recruitment team.