Data engineer Central Europe

Zoolatech; Central, Northern (LA, KY); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Zoolatech is seeking an experienced Data Engineer to join the Orchestration Team, building and maintaining a robust platform for ETL/ELT workflows using diverse sources like Kafka, S3, GCS, and BigQuery. You will enable engineers, data scientists, and analysts to extract insights while simplifying big data tech.

Responsibilities include platform development, IaC with Terraform, data governance, and scalable pipeline design.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in SQL and BigQuery for data querying and modeling.
• Strong Python programming skills for CLI, services and automation.
• Experience with ETL/ELT pipelines and data-pipeline architectures.
• Hands-on practice with Airflow, Kubernetes, and Terraform for orchestration and IaC.
• In-depth knowledge of cloud data platforms (GCP preferred) and data governance concepts.
• Familiarity with CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions) and AI-assisted tooling.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and evolve orchestration platforms to simplify ETL/ELT operations.
• Provide platform and on-call support across on-site and offshore teams.
• Develop and manage cloud data infrastructure declaratively with Terraform.
• Integrate diverse data sources and destinations with high performance.
• Build metadata, data lineage, and governance capabilities across pipelines.
• Design scalable solutions for large data volumes and varied formats.
• Stay current with big data, ETL, and AI-assisted tooling.
• Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for the framework.

Skills

Python

SQL

ETL/ELT design

CI/CD

Tools

Airflow

Kubernetes

Terraform

dbt

BigQuery

Looker

Job description

Our partner is one of the largest retail e-commerce companies in North America, serving millions of customers each year and ensuring a secure and seamless shopping experience across digital and in‑store channels.

We are looking for skilled and motivated engineer Data engineer to join the innovative team. The Orchestration team manages platforms within Insights Delivery Technology organization and offers self-service solutions designed to empower engineers, data scientists, and analysts to seamlessly perform ETL/ELT operations on data from diverse sources such as Kafka, S3, GCS, BigQuery, and Postgres, and write processed data back to these sources via batch or real-time processes.

As an Orchestration Team Engineer, you will play a critical role in developing and maintaining this robust platform, ensuring that users can efficiently extract actionable insights without being burdened by the complexities of big data technologies. Your work will enable to client to scale its operations while keeping technical demands on non-engineering staff to a minimum.

Platform Support

Perform ongoing production support and on-call support duties. Work with both onsite and offshore resources daily to resolve incidents and issues.

Platform Development

Evolve, design, and maintain our orchestration platforms which aim to abstract the complexities of big data technologies and simplify ETL/ELT operations for users

Infrastructure as Code

Provision and manage cloud data infrastructure declaratively with Terraform, delivering self-service platform capabilities through automated, version-controlled pipelines.

Integration

Develop seamless connectivity to diverse data sources and destinations, ensuring high performance and reliability.

Data Governance & Metadata

Build and operate metadata, cataloging, and data-lineage capabilities that make data across Nordstrom discoverable, trustworthy, and well-governed — including integrations across transformation, streaming, BI, and ML platforms.

Scalability

Design solutions that are scalable and resilient, capable of handling large data volumes, high velocity, and diverse data formats.

Innovation

Stay up-to-date with emerging big data, ETL, and AI-assisted tooling, incorporating them into the framework as needed to enhance functionality and user experience.

Documentation

Create and maintain comprehensive documentation, ensuring users can easily understand and utilize the framework

Proficiency in SQL (e.g., BigQuery).

Solid understanding of ETL/ELT processes, data pipeline architecture, and modern transformation frameworks such as dbt.

Strong programming skills in Python, with the ability to build and maintain CLIs, services, and automation.

Experience with cloud data platforms, primarily GCP (BigQuery, Dataproc Serverless, GCS); AWS experience a plus.

Experience with Infrastructure as Code — particularly Terraform — for provisioning and managing cloud data infrastructure.

Experience building and orchestrating data pipelines with Airflow and Kubernetes.

Experience with streaming / event data using Kafka (e.g., Confluent Cloud).

Working understanding of data governance concepts — metadata management, data cataloging, and data lineage.

Familiarity with CI/CD and Git-based workflows (GitHub Actions) for platform and pipeline delivery.

Proficiency with AI-assisted developer tooling — LLMs, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and "copilot"-style productivity tools — and a track record of using them to work more effectively.

Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively in a collaborative environment.

Nice to Have

Hands-on experience with a metadata / data-catalog / lineage platform such as DataHub (or Collibra, Amundsen, or similar).

Experience with BI / semantic-layer tools such as Looker / LookML.

Experience with data quality, observability, SLOs / error budgets, and on-call operations for data platforms.

Familiarity with distributed processing frameworks such as Spark; Java / Scala a plus.