Data Engineer III: End-to-End Data Pipelines

United States Digital Space LLC; Greater London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Fanatics is seeking a Data Engineer III to join our Data Engineering team in the UK. You will build and govern data infrastructure powering our platforms, using Python ingestion pipelines, Airflow orchestration, and Snowflake/Databricks to move data securely from source to decision-ready output.

You will implement end-to-end ingestion sources, investigate and fix pipeline issues, and ensure data quality and governance.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of professional software or data engineering experience.
• Strong SQL and Python skills, with solid experience building and operating production data pipelines.
• Comfort investigating and root-causing pipeline issues independently before escalating.
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow or similar) and a cloud data warehouse/lakehouse (Snowflake, Databricks, or similar).
• Solid understanding of data pipeline concepts: idempotency, schema evolution, backfills, and data quality/testing.
• Experience giving substantive code review feedback, not just style or formatting comments.
• Strong communication skills — can write a clear technical handover, ask sharp questions in spec review, and explain a data lineage investigation to a non-technical stakeholder.
• A track record of taking ownership of known-class problems end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Implement new ingestion sources end-to-end against a senior engineer's design — connector code, DAG, schema, monitoring, and catalog registration — extending the team's existing framework where a new source needs a pattern it doesn't yet support.
• Investigate pipeline failures independently, recognize known classes of issues, and ship the documented fix without needing to upscale.
• Before shipping a new pipeline, identify downstream consumers and what would break if data were late or wrong, and flag gaps like this during spec review — before writing code.
• Write clear handovers when escalating a genuinely unresolved issue — what you tried, what you ruled out, and where things diverge — so a senior can pick up without re-discovery.
• Review peers' pipeline PRs and catch non-obvious issues (e.g., missing idempotency checks, race conditions) that could cause incorrect downstream data.
• Turn ambiguous "why is this data wrong?" questions into structured investigations — tracing data lineage from source to warehouse and communicating back what you found.
• Surface concerns in spec review as specific, well-reasoned questions rather than staying silent or blocking progress.
• Support data security and governance work (e.g., PII masking, access controls) and contribute to data delivery work, including reverse ETL integrations.
• Build strong working relationships with internal stakeholders and help scope and clarify requirements for new work.
• Mentor DE2s on their first significant projects — pairing on tricky decisions and helping them apply team conventions.

Skills

SQL

Python

Pipeline troubleshooting

Airflow

Snowflake/Databricks

Data governance concepts

Code review

Communication skills

Ownership of problems

Tools

Datadog

Job description

Fanatics is seeking a Data Engineer III to join our Data Engineering team in the UK. You will build and govern data infrastructure powering our platforms, using Python ingestion pipelines, Airflow orchestration, and Snowflake/Databricks to move data securely from source to decision-ready output.

You will implement end-to-end ingestion sources, investigate and fix pipeline issues, and ensure data quality and governance.