Staff Data Engineer (GCP/BigQuery/dbt) - Portugal Full Remote

ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY

We're hiring a Staff Data Engineer to join a mature, data-driven organisation building analytics and data products at scale on Google Cloud. This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who has spent a decade close to the data — designing ingestion, shaping models, and making pipelines reliable enough that the business trusts them without thinking twice. You'll work fully remote from Portugal, with optional access to our hubs in Porto, Aveiro and Coimbra whenever you want a change of scenery. Expect real ownership: architectural decisions, modelling standards, and the technical direction of the platform are yours to influence, not just to implement.

PROJECT & CONTEXT

You'll join an established data platform team responsible for the ingestion and transformation layer that feeds analytics, reporting and downstream data consumers across the company. The stack is Google Cloud native — BigQuery at the core, with dbt driving transformation and a CI/CD-first approach to everything that ships. Current priorities include strengthening the underlying ingestion and pipeline engineering, consolidating modelling standards across domains, and raising the bar on data quality and governance. It's a hands-on engineering environment where design decisions are debated properly and technical depth is valued over process.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR (Required)

• Minimum 10 years of professional experience as a Data Engineer
• Strong SQL and Python 3.11+ (production-grade, tested, maintainable code)
• Vast hands-on experience with ETL/ELT tooling and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or equivalent)
• Solid production experience with dbt (dbt Core 1.8+ / dbt Cloud)
• Strong understanding of data modelling methodologies: Kimball, Inmon and Data Vault
• Proficiency in the Google Cloud environment, specifically BigQuery and GCP (mandatory)
• Direct, hands-on experience building the underlying ingestion and pipeline engineering — not just consuming existing pipelines
• Fluent English, written and spoken (working language of the team)

NICE TO HAVE (Preferred)

• Experience with data governance frameworks, cataloguing and lineage tooling
• Orchestration with Apache Airflow 2.9+ / Cloud Composer
• Streaming ingestion with Pub/Sub or Kafka 3.x
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform 1.x
• Containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes
• Portuguese (not required — our teams work in English)