Senior Data Engineer — Data Platform & AI Tooling

**Type:** Ongoing, freelance-to-hire · **Location:** Remote We're building out an internal data platform that unifies audience, product, and reporting data across our media properties, and we need a strong developer to help build it, not just maintain what's already there. **What you'll work on** - Building out our internal Customer Data Platform (CDP): unifying audience, product, institution, and geography data across our media properties into a single data model - Migrating reporting off a legacy BI tool (GoodData) and onto Databricks — building proper reporting tables/views, not just one-off dashboards, so data can be queried directly (including through AI/agentic tools, not just viewed) - Designing and extending a shared product/content tagging taxonomy that ties leads, products, and institutions together across multiple brands - Building and maintaining ETL pipelines in Python — ingesting, transforming, and modeling data from multiple sources into our Databricks environment - Working alongside our existing small dev team and external data vendor partners, picking up systems-building work that's currently bottlenecked on one person **Technical background we're looking for** - Strong Python skills, especially for building and maintaining ETL pipelines - Strong SQL and data modeling — comfortable designing schemas that need to serve multiple brands/properties cleanly, not just one - Databricks experience: building tables/views, workflows, and reporting layers others can query - Hands-on experience with Databricks Unity Catalog metric views — building reusable, governed metric definitions rather than one-off dashboard logic - Experience building or tuning Databricks Genie Spaces (or a comparable natural-language-to-SQL semantic layer), so non-technical teams can query data directly through AI rather than waiting on a dashboard - Experience building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers/tools — a concrete, checkable skill, not just "uses AI tools" - Daily, fluent use of Claude Code (or a comparable agentic coding tool) as a core part of how you build — not optional, this is how our team works - Experience migrating or replacing a legacy BI/reporting system is a strong plus - Bonus: experience with session-level attribution modeling (matching session-based data against a legacy BI tool's attribution logic during a migration) - Comfortable with ambiguity: this is systems-building work without a detailed spec handed to you, in a small, fast-moving team - Required: 4+ hours of overlap with US Pacific time, Monday–Friday with a strong preference for candidates based in or near Pacific Time **Who you are** - A strong, independent developer who can take a loosely-scoped problem and build a real system around it - Able to work with minimal oversight — this is a small, fast-moving team, not a place with a big spec-writing process - Comfortable picking up an existing codebase and collaborating with a small internal team rather than working in isolation **Engagement** - Freelance/contract to start, with a path to full-time for the right fit - We're looking to hire an independent freelancer directly, not an agency - Rate: $60–70/hr