Senior Data Engineer

How do you build a reliable pipeline when the tools haven't even been chosen yet?

As Senior Data Engineer at Budget Thuis, you'll help lay the technical foundation for how a Dutch energy supplier uses its data, from warehouse to orchestration and be one of the more experienced voices in the room while we figure it out. Curious what that looks like in practice? Read on.

What You'll Do

As Senior Data Engineer, you'll be one of the first members of our new data team and help build our data platform from scratch, working alongside one Data Engineer peer.

• Help evaluate and choose the tools for our data stack: data warehouse, ELT, and orchestration - and make architecture-level calls together with your manager, not just implement someone else's design.

• Build and maintain data pipelines, and mentor and unblock your peer day-to-day, without formal management responsibility.

• Add data quality checks to every pipeline change: null checks, row counts, schema validation, and dbt tests (or equivalent) as standard practice, not an extra step.

• Break your work into small, deployable increments and keep pull requests focused.

• Monitor pipeline outputs after every deployment and keep the codebase easy to work with.

• Respond quickly to pipeline failures, investigate the root cause, and escalate when an issue is bigger than the two of you.

• Review pull requests with constructive feedback, pair with your peer on complex or unfamiliar work, and help set the technical bar the team grows on.

• Communicate early when changes affect downstream consumers such as BI, ML, or customers, and prioritize based on customer impact.

• Share what you've learned from past platform builds - including what you'd do differently - and help translate that into how this team works.

About the Team

You'll work closely with our Senior Engineering Manager, Data Platform, the BI team and our engineering teams who will produce data for and consume data from, your pipelines every day. The data platform team is brand new, so you'll help set up not just the architecture, but also the tools and ways of working around them. We haven't locked in our stack yet, which means your input on choices like the data warehouse or orchestration tool actually counts - and carries real weight given your experience. It's a small team, so you'll see the direct result of your work and help shape how things get done from day one.

Requirements

What You Bring

You recognize yourself in most of the points below, whether your job title was Data Engineer, Analytics Engineer, or ETL Engineer.

Must-haves

• 10 years of hands-on experience building and maintaining production data pipelines in a modern cloud data stack: a cloud data warehouse, dbt (or equivalent), and an orchestration tool such as Airflow or Dagster;

• Comfortable making architecture-level calls together with your manager, not just implementing someone else's designs;

• Experience navigating a platform that was still being actively built or migrated - not a settled, mature stack - and can speak concretely to what that was like;

• Comfortable writing tests and embedding data quality checks as a natural part of your work, not an afterthought;

• A track record of shipping incrementally: you prefer simple, working solutions over over-engineered ones;

• Solid collaboration skills, including the ability to mentor and unblock a less experienced peer day-to-day, without needing a formal title to do it;

• Curiosity about the business behind the data: you want to understand how your pipelines connect to real outcomes for customers and colleagues in the energy sector.

Nice to have

• Experience with Azure cloud services (Data Lake, Databricks, Event Hubs);

• Exposure to data governance tools such as lineage, cataloging, or quality monitoring;

• Domain knowledge in utilities, energy, or telco;

• Experience working alongside a BI team;

• Experience working in a small team (fewer than 3 people).

At Budget Thuis, it's important that you can be 100% yourself. We welcome different perspectives and personalities. For this role, we're especially keen to hear from people whose background adds something valuable to our team.

Why the grass is greener here

• A gross monthly salary of €6.500,- to €7.800,- based on a 40-hour workweek;

• 13th month salary;

• Budget Summer Holiday: every Friday off in July and August (9 extra days);

• 1 paid volunteering day per year;

• 25 holiday days, with the option to buy 1.5 extra weeks;

• Pension: 16% of gross salary incl. holiday allowance (11% Budget Thuis, 5% own contribution);

• Monthly ClassPass credits;

• Travel: Swapfiets or NS Business Card, your choice;

• Free mobile and internet subscription from Budget Thuis;

• Hybrid working (50/50);

• 1 month per year fully remote;

• Free access to OpenUp for mental health and courses.

Interested?

Ready to help build our data platform from the very first pipeline as Data Engineer? Apply or reach out to Wouter van Ittersum, [email protected] with any questions. Relocation is not possible.

Relocation is not possible.