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

Smart Working is dedicated to creating a work environment where your role feels meaningful and fulfilling every day, not just impressive on paper. This opportunity goes beyond traditional remote jobs by fostering a genuine community that prioritizes your growth and well-being from the very start. Our mission is to eliminate geographic barriers and connect talented professionals with exceptional global teams for full-time, long-term positions. We enable you to engage in meaningful work with teams that are committed to your success, empowering both your personal and professional development. Recognized as one of the highest-rated workplaces on Glassdoor, Smart Working offers a truly remote-first experience where you can thrive.

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 to ensure seamless data flow.
- Develop and optimize systems for vector search, retrieval, and machine learning data workflows.
- Ensure data reliability, security, and governance across the platform.
- Collaborate closely with AI, backend engineering, product, and leadership teams to support training, inference, and product features.
- Implement monitoring, observability, and data quality frameworks to maintain system health.
- Optimize performance for large-scale datasets and query systems.
- Contribute to technical architecture decisions and define the long-term data strategy.
- Serve as the founding senior data hire by establishing culture, standards, and hiring criteria for the growing data function.
- Partner directly with founders and product leadership to translate data capabilities into impactful product decisions.

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

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

Smart Working may utilize artificial intelligence tools to assist in reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, and assessing candidate responses to identify inconsistencies or verification signals. These tools support the recruitment process but do not replace human judgment. All final hiring decisions are made by our recruitment team. Candidates seeking more information about data processing during recruitment are encouraged to inquire further.