Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-hitting senior data engineering gig where having an active Google Cloud Platform Professional Data Engineer certification isn't just a nice-to-have—it's an absolute gatekeeper. You will be stepping in to own end-to-end data delivery, build real-time streaming pipelines, and establish solid data governance frameworks on GCP.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You'll spend your days driving the end-to-end delivery of source-domain data engineering, architecting real-time streaming ingestion pipelines, and building out clean, curated data marts. Expect to tackle complex distributed systems challenges like event ordering, deduplication, dead-letter queues, and handling replays without breaking production. Beyond writing code, you will lead a small engineering pod, run code reviews, and collaborate closely with platform architects to ensure operational readiness and robust data governance.
The Core Tech Stack
You're going to live and breathe Google Cloud Platform, leaning heavily on BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and Apache Beam for your heavy data lifting. Python and advanced SQL are non-negotiable since you'll be writing pipelines and complex transformations daily, paired with tools like Dataform or dbt for dimensional modeling and conformed dimensions. Infrastructure-as-Code via Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and data quality testing frameworks are standard expectations here, with bonus points if you've touched Dataplex, DLP, Analytics Hub, Looker, or public sector environments.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring team to grill you on streaming architecture edge cases, specifically asking how you handle late-arriving data, event ordering guarantees, and deduplication at scale in Apache Beam or Dataflow. They want to see if you actually understand state management and windowing in distributed systems rather than just parroting textbook definitions. They will also test your practical knowledge of GCP data governance and optimization—be ready to explain how you'd partition and cluster a massive BigQuery table to control costs while maintaining sub-second query performance.
Application Advice
Do not even bother applying if your resume doesn't prominently feature your active Google Cloud Platform Professional Data Engineer certification right at the top. Make sure to weave exact keywords like Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Apache Beam, Dataform, and Terraform naturally into your experience bullet points. Highlight instances where you led a small team or mentored junior engineers, as this role carries significant technical leadership responsibilities alongside the hands-on data building.