Senior Data Engineer

SENIOR DATA ENGINEER | DRESDEN 16-Month ANÜ Engagement up to €102,000 p.a (negotiable) — 40% Home Office — 3 Positions

THE ROLE

Almost every data platform built in the last decade assumes a hyperscaler. Managed Kafka, managed Spark, someone else's object store, someone else's control plane. This one does none of that.

You would be helping design and build an on-premises data platform from the ground up, for an established German technology company whose products operate in regulated, security-critical environments where public cloud is not an option. That constraint is the whole point of the role. It means the orchestration, the streaming layer, the storage and the control plane all have to be chosen, built and operated by the team rather than rented — and it means the engineering decisions are real ones with trade-offs attached.

Three positions on the same team, sixteen months, and a platform that does not exist yet.

YOU WILL

• Contribute to the conception and development of an on-premises data platform — architecture and build, not maintenance of something already running
• Develop and integrate the components for data orchestration, deployment and platform automation
• Implement batch and low-latency streaming pipelines, and the platform services that sit around them
• Integrate workloads on Kubernetes and S3-compatible object storage at the edge
• Investigate data catalogues and data versioning, and decide how they fit into the platform
• Build proof of concepts independently, using AI agent tools such as Cursor.ai as part of your normal workflow
• Work directly with lead architects and the infrastructure and security teams, in a setting where security requirements shape the design rather than arriving afterwards

ESSENTIAL REQUIREMENTS

• Several years of production experience with Kubernetes and Kubernetes infrastructure, and with Linux — you have run clusters, not only deployed onto them
• Familiarity with modern data platform architectures such as Kappa or Medallion, and hands-on experience of both batch and low-latency streaming pipelines
• A genuine Cloud Native background with Linux containers and Kubernetes, and your own view on how edge data management gets built without public cloud dependencies
• Practical knowledge across Python, Golang, SQL (MPP), Bash and Java — this is a polyglot platform, not a Python-only one
• Hands-on experience with a significant subset of: S3-compatible object storage, Apache Iceberg, GitOps workflows, NATS.io, Risingwave, Dagster, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink and Apache Airflow
• A completed degree in Computer Science or a comparable qualification
• Very good German — written and spoken. A hard requirement, not a preference
• Very good English — written and spoken. Both languages are mandatory
• EU or EEA member state citizenship — hard requirement. Country of birth applies; naturalisation alone does not satisfy it

ADVANTAGEOUS

• Several years of professional experience as a Data Scientist alongside the platform work
• Cursor.ai or other AI coding tools used daily rather than trialled
• NUMA and core pinning, or any low-level performance tuning on physical hardware
• Experience of air-gapped, classified or otherwise network-restricted environments
• Bare metal, MinIO, Ceph or self-hosted Kubernetes at production scale

WHY THIS ONE

Sixteen months is long enough to see a platform through from conception to production rather than inheriting someone else's decisions. The team is small, the architecture is genuinely open, and the client is explicitly looking for someone who will bring their own ideas rather than implement a reference design.

And the skill set is rare in the right direction. Cloud-native data engineers are abundant. Engineers who can build the same capability without a hyperscaler underneath are not, and that is a difficult thing to learn anywhere other than on a role like this one.

THE DETAILS

Location: Dresden, Germany — 40% home office, roughly three days a week on site

Contract: 16-month ANÜ engagement — a full employment contract including holiday pay and social contributions

Hours: 40 per week

Duration: To 31 December 2027

Salary: Up to €102,000 gross per year, depending on experience

Start: As soon as you are available

Positions: 3