ZipStaff Inc.
Senior Data Engineer
Jersey City, New Jersey•Contract
$58 - $60 hourly
$58 - $60 hourly
About the Job
Job Title: Senior Data Engineer.
Location: Jersey City, NJ (On-site).
Employment Type: Contract (W2 through ZipStaff — No C2C or 1099).
Location: Jersey City, NJ (On-site).
Employment Type: Contract (W2 through ZipStaff — No C2C or 1099).
About the Opportunity:
ZipStaff is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to build and operate enterprise data pipelines for a leading healthcare analytics organization supporting financial and accounting platforms.
This role requires expert-level Apache Airflow, dbt Core, and production Kubernetes / OpenShift. General ETL or warehouse-only engineers without orchestration and container depth will not be a fit.
What You’ll Do:
- 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 CPU/memory requests and limits, autoscaling, and pod scheduling.
- Troubleshoot container performance and resource contention.
- Monitor end-to-end pipeline health; add logs, metrics, and alerts.
- Partner with architects, platform engineers, and business stakeholders.
- Support financial reporting, accounting, and regulated data use cases.
- Enforce data-engineering standards, security, and governance.
Required Qualifications:
- 10+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data platform engineering.
- Expert-level Apache Airflow (DAG design, scheduling, performance tuning).
- Expert-level dbt Core (modeling, testing, macros, production implementation).
- Strong Python for data engineering and automation.
- Production Kubernetes and/or OpenShift for data workloads.
- Strong SQL for complex transformations.
- Experience with distributed workload management and performance tuning.
- Cloud data platforms, containerized deploys, CI/CD, and Git.
- Ability to work on-site in Jersey City, NJ.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Financial services or accounting data platforms.
- Enterprise migrations from legacy systems to a modern data stack.
- Data warehouse experience, including Oracle.
About ZipStaff:
ZipStaff partners with leading organizations to connect skilled technology professionals with high-impact contract opportunities. We focus on quality matches and long-term success.
To apply, please submit your resume highlighting production Airflow DAGs, dbt Core modeling, and Kubernetes/OpenShift data workloads.