Senior Data Engineer

At Mindera, we believe that software is built by people, for people with high performance systems that impact users worldwide. We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to build and run the pipelines and platforms that move our customers' data: from source systems to the warehouse, on production systems with real consequences.

We value empathy, self-organization, and the courage to take risks. If you love solving complex problems and believe that teaching others is the best way to learn, you’ll feel right at home here.

We’re looking for someone who loves to build, learn, and guide others. You’ll be working closely with our leadership (CEO/COO) and our clients, so clear communication and a collaborative spirit are key.

At Mindera we encourage the use of AI to assist with coding and related tasks. We find a persons skill in engineering and software craft, has a big impact long term successful delivery, with or without AI. Our goal in the interview process is to understand the candidates knowledge and skill with engineering.

If you need to, or plan to use AI, please be transparent with us when you're using it, to avoid issues and misunderstandings that can either: impact your chance of securing the role or impact your success at Mindera.

National and international expected traveling time varies according to project/client and organizational needs: 0%-15% estimated.

💪 How You'll Contribute

• Pipeline Engineering: Build and operate robust ingestion pipelines (both batch and streaming) from databases, event streams, and third-party APIs.
• Storage & Performance: Own storage architecture across the lake, lakehouse, and warehouse, optimizing for partitioning, cost efficiency, and query speed.
• Reliability & Observability: Keep pipelines observable and restartable by implementing orchestration, automated testing, alerting, and ensuring clean recovery when something breaks at 08:00.
• Engineering Best Practices: Work like a true software engineer by implementing infrastructure as code, CI/CD for data workloads, code reviews, and strict version control.
• Data Contracts & Governance: Agree on data contracts with data-producing teams to keep schema drift under control, while managing access, retention, and lineage.
• Lasting Documentation: Produce clear and comprehensive documentation that ensures your work outlives the engagement.

Requirements

🌿 We're Looking for Someone Who...

• Has Proven Production Experience: You have built and ran data pipelines in production—and, more importantly, you can articulate what you learned when they broke.
• Is an AI-Augmented Engineer: You seamlessly integrate AI tooling into your daily workflow, but you maintain the strict review discipline to verify what it generates before it ships.
• Is a Confident Communicator: You possess fluent English and are completely comfortable working directly with customer teams.
• Has a Cost Engineering Mindset (Valued): You know how to make a pipeline cheaper and can quantify the savings.
• Understands Compliance (Valued): You have exposure to regulated environments, including GDPR obligations, access control, and auditable lineage.

🛠️ Your Technical Toolkit:

• Core Languages: Advanced, production-grade SQL and Python.
• Cloud Platforms: Production depth in one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), with a solid grasp of principles to move between them. (A second cloud platform is a plus).
• Orchestration: Production experience with an orchestrator from a main vendor (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, Azure Data Factory, or equivalent).
• Warehousing & Transformation (Nice to have): Warehouse depth in Snowflake or BigQuery (dimensional or Data Vault modelling), and experience with dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks.
• Processing & Streaming (Nice to have): Spark or PySpark at scale, Databricks, and streaming/pub-sub brokers like Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, or MQTT-class brokers.
• AI Data Infrastructure & Formats (Nice to have): Embedding pipelines, vector stores, retrieval feeds, feature stores, and open table/file formats (Parquet, Iceberg, Delta).
• DevOps & Quality (Nice to have): Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, and data quality frameworks in production (Great Expectations, Soda, Monte Carlo).
• Source Systems (Nice to have): NoSQL stores (like MongoDB) and marketing/ad-platform data (Google Ads, Meta, CRM platform APIs).

💬 Recruitment Stages

• Screening - Reviewing CVs and eligibility verification.
• 1st Call - 30 minute call to access Technical & Culture Fit with IT Recruiter.
• Tech Interview - 2 hour call with two of our Cloud Engineers to assess your technical knowledge in depth. The interview includes a theoretical section based on test-case scenarios as well as live practical exercises
• Cultural Interview - 1-hour call with a Minder to assess cultural fit with Mindera and align expectations for both parties.
• Project/Client Call - A 30 minute to 1 hour call with the client or project team to assess your technical fit for a specific project and align expectations.

Benefits

🎊 What’s in it for You?

We work in Self-organization culture and therefore we offer a flexible, supportive environment where you are trusted to manage your own time and career.

• Well-being First: health insurance and "Open Holidays" because we trust you to know when you need a break.
• Flexible Working hours and Work: Work from our vibrant hubs in Porto, Aveiro, or Coimbra, or choose a remote setup that works for you. As long as you are based in Portugal :)
• Career Growth: A dedicated budget for training and conferences, plus a transparent profit-sharing model.
• Tools for Success: Choose Laptop & Peripherals that best suit your needs, plus Hotspot with unlimited usage (PT), for work or Netflix ;)
• Team work makes the dream Work: Mindera Annual Trip, Sports, and sharing groups to connect and have fun!

🫂Why Mindera?

At Mindera, we use technology to build products we are proud of, with people we love.

We believe diverse teams build better products. Mindera is a place where you can be your authentic self, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, religion, or background. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels they belong and has an equal opportunity to grow.

Most of all, you get to work with a group of great people in a politics free environment where the whole team owns the project together. Our culture reflects our lean and self-management mindset, encouraging colleagues to take risks, make decisions, collaborate openly, and communicate with everyone.

Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand, and we value commitment, feedback, and empathy. We are proud of our work and love learning about everything as we navigate an Agile, Lean, and collaborative environment.

Curious to know more? Check out our Blog and our Handbook!

With offices located across Portugal,United Kingdom,United States,India,Romania,Brazil,Morocco,Spain,Australia, Vietnam join us as we expand and influence the future of software engineering worldwide.