Senior Data Engineer (Romania)

About the Position

We are looking for someone genuinely exceptional: not broadly experienced, but specifically excellent in a way you can name and prove. This role is for a data engineer who can walk into a platform someone else built, work out what is actually wrong with it, and decide what to fix first.

You'll join a small, senior Data & Analytics team at a real estate investment firm that has built a sophisticated data platform on Snowflake, pulling together 40+ data sources. Your job is to stabilize the environment, make reporting reliable, and automate the manual work, so that people can focus on the investment and operating decisions that matter.

Your work will support three areas of the business:

• Transactions: buy/sell decisions, commercial leasing, and valuation
• Reporting and source of truth: benchmarks, fund and asset performance, and management reporting
• Day-to-day decision making: giving teams faster, better access to the information they need to run the business

You'll work directly with the client's technical and business teams, assess whether the platform is as strong as it looks, and raise the standard around you through code review, documentation, and the willingness to push back when something isn't right.

Responsibilities

• Stabilize and improve a sophisticated data platform on Snowflake
• Diagnose and fix pipelines you didn’t write
• Design, implement, and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines and data integration across many sources
• Strong data modeling: stating and enforcing grain, clean layering from raw through staging to marts, handling corrections and late-arriving data
• Advanced SQL, including window functions and query performance work
• Experience with a transformation framework (dbt or equivalent) and an orchestrator (Airflow, Dagster, or similar)
• A working relationship with AI that shows up in how you build, not just in the tools you’ve tried
• Comfort owning work end to end: from design through deployment and support
• A quality mindset: clean code, good documentation, thoughtful testing, and attention to data quality and lineage
• Strong English communication, async collaboration skills, and a proactive approach to problems
• The ability to understand the business behind the data, not just the ticket in front of you

Requirements

• 5+ years in data engineering, with real ownership of a production platform rather than contributing to someone else’s
• Hands-on Snowflake: warehouse sizing and cost management, MERGE patterns, streams and tasks, clustering
• Experience diagnosing and fixing pipelines you didn’t write: slow queries, unexplained cost, silent data quality failures
• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines and data integration across many sources
• Strong data modeling: stating and enforcing grain, clean layering from raw through staging to marts, handling corrections and late-arriving data
• Advanced SQL, including window functions and query performance work
• Experience with a transformation framework (dbt or equivalent) and an orchestrator (Airflow, Dagster, or similar)
• A working relationship with AI that shows up in how you build, not just in the tools you’ve tried
• Comfort owning work end to end: from design through deployment and support
• A quality mindset: clean code, good documentation, thoughtful testing, and attention to data quality and lineage
• Strong English communication, async collaboration skills, and a proactive approach to problems
• The ability to understand the business behind the data, not just the ticket in front of you

Nice to Have

• Asset management or commercial real estate experience
• Familiarity with systems such as Yardi, MRI, RealPage, Argus, VTS, or CoStar
• Building analytics-ready models for BI tools (Power BI in particular)
• AWS Glue or EMR alongside Snowflake
• Exposure to workflow automation tools (Power Automate, UiPath)
• A track record of mentoring other engineers

We Offer

• Real impact: You'll work on meaningful products that make a measurable difference
• An outstanding team: Talented, kind, hardworking people who care about their craft and about each other. No egos. No politics.
• Growth: You'll be supported in growing your craft, exploring new paths, and stepping into greater responsibility, at your own pace
• A culture of excellence: We care about doing the right thing for our clients, our team, and ourselves. No burnout. No crunch. Just high quality work, delivered sustainably
• Variety and stability: We're profitable, independent, and over two decades strong. Yet every project brings a fresh challenge. You'll never be bored here

About the Company

Our mission is simple: design and build great products.

What sets us apart isn’t just the talent of our team - it’s the way we work:

• We Have A Bias For Action & Results. We are doers - we spot the gaps, connect the dots, anticipate what’s around the corner and take action. We move fast, stay focused, and let the results - not the effort - speak for themselves.
• We Work On Time, On Budget, On Quality. Discipline is our edge - a commitment we make to each other, to our clients, and to the standards we hold ourselves to.
• We Care Deeply. We care about our work and about each other. Care Is A Competitive Advantage.
• We Do Things Right - Because It’s the Right Thing to Do. Right over easy. Integrity isn’t up for negotiation. We hold the bar high even when no one’s watching. We take pride in doing great work the right way - not the easy way.
• We Keep Improving. The best teams keep improving and we’re never done learning. We iterate. We reflect on what’s working and what’s not. Feedback fuels us, we receive it openly, and adapt quickly. Progress over perfection.
• We’re Obsessed With Agility, Not The Agile Manifesto. We don’t chase dogma or rituals - we chase momentum. We adapt processes to fit problems, not the other way around.
• We Take Ownership. Everyone leads something here. You will have room to run with ideas, and the trust to execute. That trust is built on how you show up: thinking things through, sweating the details, and following through.

Founded in 2008, Lateral Group is a profitable, award-winning design and technology company with over 20 years of experience launching bold ventures and transforming businesses. A globally distributed team of 200+ experts united by a shared purpose: the continuous pursuit of quality.

Locations

• Bucharest, Romania
• Cluj-Napoca, Romania
• Oradea, Romania

Remote Status

• Hybrid

How to Apply

Show us the work that reflects you at your best. We'll look at depth, the quality of your thinking, and the logic behind your choices. Speak with our Talent team about your career direction, your motivators, and our plans ahead. Tackle a take-home challenge that mirrors what we actually do. Participate in a collaborative session with our engineers. An interview focused on prioritisation, collaboration across disciplines, and how you handle the messy middle.

Join us!