Senior Data Engineer - Airflow, dbt & Kubernetes

ZipStaff Inc.; Jersey City (NJ); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

On-site work

Contract through ZipStaff (W2)

Job summary

ZipStaff Inc. is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and operate enterprise data pipelines for a healthcare analytics client in Jersey City, NJ.

You will own Airflow DAG development, dbt Core modeling, and Kubernetes/OpenShift deployment for high-concurrency workloads in production. This contract (W2 through ZipStaff) requires 10+ years of data engineering experience, expert Airflow and dbt Core skills, and strong Python and SQL capabilities.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data platform engineering.
• Expert-level Airflow design, scheduling, and performance tuning.
• Expert-level dbt Core modeling, testing, macros, and production deployment.
• Strong Python for data engineering and automation.
• Production Kubernetes/OpenShift for data workloads.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain complex Airflow DAGs (batch and event-driven).
• Tune DAG performance, dependencies, retries, SLAs, and alerting.
• Optimize Airflow scheduler, executor, and workers for high-concurrency workloads.
• Lead dbt Core implementation: project structure, environments, and CI/CD.
• Design staging/intermediate/mart models, tests, docs, macros, and incremental models.
• Optimize dbt/SQL performance for large datasets and downstream reporting.
• Deploy and run data workloads on Kubernetes/OpenShift; set resource limits and autoscaling.
• Troubleshoot container performance and resource contention; monitor end-to-end pipeline health.

Skills

Airflow expertise

Python

SQL

Cloud data platforms

CI/CD

Git

On-site Jersey City

US work authorization

Tools

Airflow

dbt Core

Kubernetes/OpenShift

Job description

ZipStaff Inc. is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and operate enterprise data pipelines for a healthcare analytics client in Jersey City, NJ.

You will own Airflow DAG development, dbt Core modeling, and Kubernetes/OpenShift deployment for high-concurrency workloads in production. This contract (W2 through ZipStaff) requires 10+ years of data engineering experience, expert Airflow and dbt Core skills, and strong Python and SQL capabilities.