Job Description

Senior Data Engineer (Python/SQL/Airflow) - Portugal Full Remote

ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY

Join a product-driven engineering company that builds high-performance systems used worldwide. This is a senior role on production data platforms where pipeline failures have real business consequences and your decisions on architecture, cost and reliability carry weight. You will work in a self-organised, low-politics environment with genuine autonomy over how you manage your time and your career. Fully remote within Portugal, with optional access to collaborative hubs in Porto, Aveiro and Coimbra. Expected travel, national and international, varies by project: 0% to 15%.

PROJECT & CONTEXT

You will build and operate the pipelines and platforms that move customer data from source systems into the warehouse. Scope covers batch and streaming ingestion from databases, event streams and third-party APIs; storage architecture across lake, lakehouse and warehouse, optimised for partitioning, cost and query speed; and orchestration, automated testing, alerting and clean recovery so pipelines stay observable and restartable. You will apply full software engineering discipline to data: infrastructure as code, CI/CD for data workloads, code reviews and strict version control. You will also negotiate data contracts with producing teams to control schema drift, manage access, retention and lineage, and leave behind documentation that outlives the engagement. Direct exposure to leadership and client teams is part of the role, so clear communication matters as much as technical depth. The company actively encourages AI-assisted engineering, with transparency about its use expected throughout the process.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR (Required)

• Proven experience building and running data pipelines in production, including the ability to explain what broke and what you learned
• Advanced, production-grade SQL
• Advanced Python (3.12)
• Production depth in one major cloud provider: AWS, GCP or Azure, with principles solid enough to move between them
• Production experience with a mainstream orchestrator: Apache Airflow 2.10, Dagster or Azure Data Factory
• Infrastructure as code, CI/CD for data workloads, code review and version control as standard practice
• Data contracts, schema drift control, access management, retention and lineage
• AI-augmented workflow with strict review discipline before anything ships
• Fluent English, spoken and written, for direct work with customer teams
• Based in Portugal

NICE TO HAVE (Preferred)

• Second cloud platform in production
• Warehouse depth in Snowflake or BigQuery, with dimensional or Data Vault modelling
• dbt 1.9 or equivalent transformation framework
• Apache Spark 3.5 or PySpark at scale, and Databricks
• Streaming and pub/sub brokers: Apache Kafka 3.8, Kinesis, Pub/Sub or MQTT-class brokers
• AI data infrastructure: embedding pipelines, vector stores, retrieval feeds, feature stores
• Open table and file formats: Parquet, Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake
• Terraform 1.9, Docker, Kubernetes 1.31, GitHub Actions
• Data quality frameworks in production: Great Expectations, Soda or Monte Carlo
• Cost engineering mindset, with the ability to quantify pipeline savings
• Regulated environment exposure: GDPR obligations, access control, auditable lineage
• NoSQL stores such as MongoDB
• Marketing and ad-platform data: Google Ads, Meta, CRM platform APIs
• Portuguese

Compensation: €2,500 – €3,200/month net, depending on experience and seniority level.

Why HumanIT people stay (4.4 Glassdoor, 89% recommend)

• 15th month salary
• Health insurance covering your family
• Birthday off
• Mobility program for digital nomads
• Real work-life balance

Full benefits: https://www.humanit.pt/careers/#perks

What it's really like: https://www.humanit.pt/careers/#work-at