Data Engineer: Build Scalable Data Foundations

Kernel; Auckland; Hybrid; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work setup

Health insurance

Parental leave top-up

Professional development budget

Dog-friendly office

Job summary

Kernel is building the data foundations that power smarter decisions for Kiwi investors. You’ll own the journey from raw data to our warehouse, crafting models, pipelines, and automated checks to deliver clean, trusted datasets.

Collaborate with the insights team and software engineers to ensure data is accurate, well‑modeled and scalable. This is a hands‑on data engineering role (not analytics) focused on data behind dashboards and reports, using Snowflake, dbt and other modern cloud tools.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of commercial experience in data engineering or closely related data role.
• Experience with modern cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift.
• Experience building transformations and automated tests with dbt or a similar tool.
• Strong SQL and data modelling skills, including handling historical data.

Responsibilities

• Design and build data models that turn raw data into clear, well-structured datasets ready for analysis.
• Map raw data into the warehouse, keeping history intact so we can always show our working.
• Bring new data sources into the warehouse, including event-based product data, transactional and people data.
• Build and maintain automated tests and checks that stop bad data before it flows downstream.
• Investigate pipeline failures and decide whether to fix at the source or adapt our models.
• Add summary and aggregate layers as data volumes grow, keeping models fast and usable.
• Partner with software engineers on how data is captured and made available from source systems.
• Recommend how our data platform should evolve, explaining trade-offs in plain language.

Skills

Data engineering

SQL

Data modelling

Communication

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

BigQuery

Redshift

Job description

Kernel is building the data foundations that power smarter decisions for Kiwi investors. You’ll own the journey from raw data to our warehouse, crafting models, pipelines, and automated checks to deliver clean, trusted datasets.

Collaborate with the insights team and software engineers to ensure data is accurate, well‑modeled and scalable. This is a hands‑on data engineering role (not analytics) focused on data behind dashboards and reports, using Snowflake, dbt and other modern cloud tools.