Data / Backend Engineer with Dagster, dbt, Alembic Experience

Job Title: Data / Backend Engineer — Data Platform (Splink)

Location: Brooklyn, New York City (Hybrid Work)

Type: 6+ Month Contract

Backend-heavy with strong data engineering

Required Skills

Python 3.12, Dagster, dbt (postgres 1.9),  PostgreSQL / RDS,  SQLAlchemy 2.

Alembic, pandas, AWS ECS/Fargate, S3, Secrets Manager, Terraform,  Docker.

GitHub Actions, Lightdash, pytest + testcontainers.

Must Have:

1. Strong Python (3.11+) and advanced SQL — window functions, CTEs, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, real query tuning
2. Production PostgreSQL experience, including performance work on large tables
3. Hands-on with a modern orchestrator and transformation stack — Dagster and dbt preferred (Airflow / Prefect / Luigi acceptable if you can pick these up quickly)
4. Comfortable with AWS fundamentals: S3, RDS, containerised services
5. Git, Docker, CI/CD. 

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain ingestion assets in Dagster and transformation models in dbt
• Design and tune PostgreSQL at scale — query plans, indexing, partitioning, materialised views, large backfills and migrations
• Work on product matching and data-quality logic across distributor feeds
• Diagnose and fix slow pipelines and slow queries (our largest tables run into tens of millions of rows on a multi-hundred-GB RDS instance)
• Contribute to schema and data-model decisions across the v1 ETL and v2 platform
• Support deployments on AWS (ECS/Fargate, RDS, S3); infra is managed in Terraform.