Senior Data Platform Engineer

Ziina; Dubai; On-site; AED 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial technology company in Dubai is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to build and maintain a data platform from the ground up. You will design scalable data pipelines and improve system performance. The ideal candidate has over 5 years of experience in data engineering, expertise in building data pipelines, and proficiency with tools like Snowflake and Dagster. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the company's data strategies in a dynamic environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Data Platform, or Analytics Engineering.
• Strong expertise in building data pipelines with orchestration tools.
• Hands-on experience ingesting data from a mix of sources.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain scalable data pipelines and processing systems.
• Design and evolve data warehouse architecture and data models.
• Improve reliability, observability, and performance of data systems.

Skills

Data engineering

Pipeline building

ETL/ELT workflows in Python

Data quality monitoring

Use of AI tools

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Dagster

PostgreSQL

AWS

Job description

Ziina is looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to join our team. This role is an exciting opportunity to build the foundations of our data platform from the ground up — the pipelines, warehouse, and tooling that will power decision-making, analytics, and future ML/AI capabilities across the company. We're at a major inflection point in our growth, and we're looking for the right person to shape how data is ingested, modeled, and consumed at Ziina as we scale.

As part of a small, agile team, our ideal candidate is a creative problem‑solver with the vision to build from the ground up and the skill to own systems end‑to‑end. You'll thrive in our fast‑paced environment by making sound tradeoffs and focusing on high‑impact solutions. We're looking for someone who is as ambitious as we are to deliver high‑quality products to our users. In short, we want owners who are ready to build big things with us.

As a Senior Data Platform Engineer at Ziina you will:

• Build and maintain scalable data pipelines and processing systems that ingest data from transactional databases, object storage, and external APIs
• Design and evolve our data warehouse architecture and data models to support analytics, reporting, and ML/AI use cases
• Improve the reliability, observability, and performance of our data systems
• Implement data quality checks and monitoring to ensure trusted, accurate data across the company
• Enable self‑service data access and analytics so product, engineering, and business teams can make data‑driven decisions independently
• Support the foundational capabilities that will power our ML and AI use‑cases as they grow

To succeed in this role, you likely:

• Bring 5+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Data Platform, or Analytics Engineering
• Have strong expertise building and maintaining data pipelines with orchestration tools like Dagster, Airflow, or Prefect, and writing ETL/ELT workflows in Python
• Are proficient with modern data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift) and transformation frameworks like dbt
• Have hands‑on experience ingesting data from a mix of sources — PostgreSQL, S3, external APIs — supporting both transactional and event‑driven use cases
• Are familiar with data quality, observability, and monitoring practices for production data systems
• Use the latest AI tools and technologies to boost your productivity
• Are based in, or open to relocating to, the UAE

What would amaze us

• Proven experience building data platforms at fintech or other high‑scale, high‑reliability companies
• A track record of designing data warehouse architectures and models that scaled cleanly as the company grew
• History of building self‑service analytics tooling that meaningfully expanded who in the company could work with data
• Experience enabling ML/AI workloads on top of a data platform — feature stores, ML pipelines, or serving infrastructure
• Active engagement in the data community through open source contributions, conference speaking, or technical writing

The data platform is a core investment area at Ziina. Our current stack is:

• Snowflake as our data warehouse, with dbt for data transformation and modeling
• Dagster for orchestrating data pipelines, with Python for building ETL/ELT workflows
• Data ingestion from PostgreSQL, S3, and external APIs, supporting both transactional and event‑driven use cases
• Metabase for analytics and internal reporting

The broader Ziina engineering stack that the data platform integrates with:

• Typescript, Node.js and Nest.js for our main application's backend
• GraphQL Federation for our client‑facing APIs and Kafka for our inter‑service communication
• PostgresSQL for consistent and durable storage, Redis for quick fetching, Elasticsearch for quick searching
• AWS for hosting our cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes for orchestrating our workloads
• Terraform for IaC, GitHub Actions for CI/CD

About Ziina

Ziina’s mission is to bring financial freedom to every person in the Middle East. We are building MENA’s consumer and SMB financial platform, starting with a peer‑to‑peer and merchant wallet. Our team have backgrounds from Apple, Uber, Stripe, Klarna, Revolut, Yandex, and Nubank. Ziina’s payments volumes have grown by 10x YoY for the last two years. The team have built a product that is beloved by the UAE and is the recipient of 8 international design awards, including the Red Dot Award and the UX Design Award. Our last round was a $22 million Series A from top‑tier investors globally including Altos Ventures, Fintech Collective, Activant, Long Journey Ventures and Y Combinator. Our angel investors include early employees and executives at Revolut, Stripe, Venmo, Brex, Checkout.com, Notion, and Deel.

Join us in shaping the future of financial freedom. Every role here is an opportunity to make a real impact. Let’s build something that matters together.