Data Engineering Lead

Seer Interactive is a digital marketing consultancy that harnesses compassion, data, technology, and AI to make a mark on our communities, our coworkers, our clients, our industry, and our neighbors. We relentlessly pursue (and share) the truth, bringing together millions of data points from quantitative and qualitative sources, enhanced by responsible, human-centered AI. Our purpose is to unlock potential across these communities, envisioning a world where doing the right thing is intuitive and informed.

At Seer, we see AI as a catalyst for innovation, collaboration, and creativity. Regardless of your division or discipline, leveraging AI is a core part of how we deliver smarter, faster, and more strategic outcomes for our clients. Our AI Council drives company-wide integration by focusing on education, purposeful implementation, and continuous learning, ensuring that AI is embedded in how we think, operate, and grow.

If you’re ready to uplift others, challenge your ego, commit to the truth, and be better than yesterday—keep reading.

Seer is a remote-first agency and a Certified B-Corp, with team members across the country. If an office environment is more your style, this position can also sit in our HQ office in Philadelphia. We can only consider candidates based in the US who can work continental US-based hours.

The Role

You, the Data Engineering Lead of our dreams, are the technical architect of Seer’s data platform, and building agentic development workflows is a core part of the job. You'll own the structural data foundation behind our analytics and AI products while finding repetitive data and BI work and designing, shipping, and maintaining agents that take it off people's plates.

At Seer, AI is embedded in how we deliver smarter, faster, and more strategic outcomes, and the modern marketing data stack is evolving past the dashboard. You’re excited to help shape it. You design platforms that let strategists, analysts, and LLMs query the same source of truth and arrive at better answers via a well-governed semantic layer. You make the engineers around you better through mentorship, code review, and pairing, and you teach in a way that sticks long after a project ends.

You’re intellectually curious, systems-minded, and not afraid to refactor a legacy DAG, rewrite a tangled query, or push back on a flawed plan. Knowing which battles to pick as you shape the future of Seer’s data structure is a core part of the job.

Role Highlights

• Set the technical direction for Seer’s data platform by defining the architecture and the standards that other engineers build toward.

• Own Seer’s data platform end-to-end across BigQuery, Dataflow, Airflow, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, and ingestion tools like Fivetran, while making the cost, latency, and freshness tradeoffs that let us scale without surprises.

• Set the standard for how we model and serve data. This runs from dimensional modeling (grain, conformed dimensions, slowly changing dimensions) and dbt incremental models to a governed LookML semantic layer with row-level security, surfaced in our embedded Looker interface and via MCP.

• Structure data for agents to retrieve correct, deterministic answers to natural language questions from our non-technical team members.

• Automate the routine work around dbt: generating tests and documentation, assessing the downstream impact of schema changes, and producing migration or backfill plans.

• Build triage agents that read pipeline failures and data quality alerts, trace the cause through logs and lineage, and fix the issue or recommend a fix within established operational guardrails.

• Tune what’s expensive: evolve the observability layer from a manual process to ai-powered workflows that hunt down the slow query, the redundant DAG, and the leaky storage policy. Cut BigQuery costs and dashboard load times, and bring the team along with you.

• Document and teach. Write playbooks that survive system evolution, decision records that explain why not just what, and onboarding paths that help each new hire ramp up faster.

• Mentor data engineers and analysts across teams, pair on tough problems, and leave PR comments that make people better, not just their code.

Essential Skills

• Expert-level fluency across the GCP data stack, including BigQuery (partitioning, clustering, materialized views, cost optimization), Dataflow, Airflow, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Datastore, and Cloud Storage, with a track record of architecting production pipelines end-to-end.

• Expert command of the analytics and BI layer: modular dbt projects, reusable LookML, Looker explores, and embedded dashboards that blend our built in-house SERP microservice data, CRM, and ad engine data into proprietary cross-platform data models. You write clean SQL and are just as good at untangling someone else’s.

• Expert Git and version control skills, which you use to unblock teammates. You’ve designed CI/CD pipelines with multi-stage deploys, automated test gates, and production debug discipline.

• Comfort working with AI and LLM tools beyond surface-level usage, including crafting layered, context-aware prompts, building evaluation harnesses to compare phrasing and sampling strategies, and integrating LLMs into engineering workflows where they earn their keep.

• Proactive and clear communication with project managers, supported by strong estimation skills to provide early visibility into deadline feasibility and guide decision-making.

• Communication range. You can brief an SLT stakeholder on a cost-saving initiative and a junior engineer on a tricky rebase in the same afternoon, and both walk away clearer.

• A track record of leading through technical authority and mentorship: setting the bar on a data engineering team, raising the level of engineers around you, and earning trust without needing a reporting line to back it up.

This might not be the right role for you if...

• Marketing context feels foreign or uninteresting to you. At Seer, the why always traces back to a client, a campaign, or a strategist.

• You want to lead from the conference room. At Seer, leads stay close to the code.

• Mentorship feels like a tax rather than a craft. At Seer, making the team around you better is the job.

• You only feel comfortable leading with a reporting line behind you. This role earns its authority through expertise and trust. Titles are not the defining factor in your ability to lead.

• You see AI as hype rather than a practical tool.

• You find time management, context-switching, and juggling multiple priorities challenging.

• You struggle to adapt to new tools and processes.

30/60/90 Day Plan

• By Day 30, you will have completed division training, gotten oriented in our GCP and Looker environments, built relationships across the data engineering team, and shipped your first reviewed PR through our CI/CD pipeline.

• By Day 60, you will have led your first architectural decision (owning the design of a new data pipeline, model, or platform improvement), mentored engineers through code review, pair programming, and consulted on a custom engineering client project.

• By Day 90, you will be up and running at full capacity, owning the technical direction of the data platform, raising the data design bar across the team, and influencing how Seer builds and operates its data stack end-to-end.