Senior Data Pipeline Engineer (Freelance)

Role Overview

Join Decentriq as a Senior Data Pipeline Engineer (Freelance). You will own end-to-end a Spark-based data pipeline, support and productionize ML models for AdTech, and continuously improve pipeline performance using profiling, benchmarking, and tuning.

Duration: 6-month freelance assignment with potential conversion to full-time.

Key Missions

• Own, design, build, and operate production data pipelines from development through production + monitoring.
• Advance ML models by improving and productionizing models for AdTech use cases such as:
  • Lookalike modeling
  • Demographics modeling
• Drive continuous improvement through:
  • Profiling, benchmarking, and tuning Spark workloads
  • Implementing best practices for orchestration and observability

Responsibilities

• Operate the Spark pipeline reliably, including monitoring and production support.
• Ensure data quality and validation via rigorous checks.
• Improve ML readiness for production, including model serving familiarity.

Requirements

Must have

• Expert-level Python and PySpark / Scala Spark experience.
• 5+ years of professional experience in relevant areas.
• Bachelor/Master/PhD in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field.
• Proven track record building resilient, production-grade data pipelines with strong data-quality/validation practices.
• Data platform skills including operating Spark clusters and using job schedulers/orchestration (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or custom schedulers).

Nice to have

• Rust proficiency (used for backend services and compute-heavy client-side modules).
• Working knowledge of the ML lifecycle and model serving.
• Experience with audience segmentation and/or lookalike modeling techniques.

Location / Work Mode

• Full remote (Zürich, CH referenced in posting).