Senior Data Engineer

About ApprovalMax

ApprovalMax is a fast-growing B2B SaaS company that helps businesses automate their approval workflows and financial controls. With a global team of over 100 people spanning the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, and South Africa, we build software that matters and we're scaling quickly.

The Role

Reporting to the Data Platform Lead, you will be a hands-on senior engineer responsible for building and maintaining ApprovalMax's enterprise data platform. You will own the design and delivery of production-grade data pipelines, drive engineering quality across the data stack, and act as a technical mentor for the broader analytics team. As we mature our hub-and-spoke model, you will be a key partner to embedded analysts and a core contributor to making the platform agentic-ready and self-service by default. This is a senior individual contributor role: deep technical work, broad influence, no direct reports.

Remote — applicants must be based in the UK, Serbia or Moldova.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable ELT pipelines, ingestion processes, and transformation layers on Azure Data Lake Gen2 + Databricks.
• Own the implementation of core data models in dbt: from source-aligned staging through to marts and semantic layers consumed by Power BI, Amplitude, and downstream tools.
• Write production-grade Python for orchestration, custom ingestion, and data transformation logic; treat pipeline code with the same rigour as application code.
• Investigate and resolve pipeline failures within agreed SLAs; lead root-cause analysis and implement durable fixes rather than one-off patches.
• Optimise pipeline performance and Databricks compute usage; surface cost and performance opportunities to the Data Platform Lead.
• Implement and maintain data quality frameworks (dbt tests, Great Expectations, or equivalent) across the platform; ensure critical data assets have explicit quality contracts.
• Instrument pipelines with monitoring, alerting, and lineage so issues are detected before they reach consumers.
• Define and enforce testing standards for ingestion jobs and dbt models: unit tests, integration tests, and freshness/volume/schema checks.
• Contribute to incident response: take on-call shifts as part of the rotation, lead post-mortems for incidents you own, and drive action items to closure.
• Partner with Product Engineering, RevOps, and Finance to define and maintain data contracts; ensure upstream changes are reflected before downstream impact.
• Contribute to the Central KPI & Metrics Glossary from a data lineage perspective: make it unambiguous which systems feed which metrics and how each is computed.
• Provide robust, well-documented data models and tooling that allow embedded (spoke) analysts to work independently without re-deriving core logic.
• Champion LLM-assisted development across the analytics team: model how to use AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or equivalent) as a default workflow for pipeline and model development.
• Build data assets to be agentic-ready by default: clean semantic layers, consistent metadata, documented contracts that AI agents and LLM tools can reliably consume.
• Act as a technical authority on the data team: lead design reviews, review pull requests with substance, and be the person analysts and engineers bring hard problems to.
• Contribute to Architecture Decision Records (ADRs); ensure significant technical choices are documented, justified, and revisable.
• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines for dbt models and ingestion jobs; enforce environment promotion discipline (dev -> staging -> prod).
• Mentor more junior engineers and analysts informally: code review, pairing, and lifting the technical bar across the team.
• Contribute to the visible technical debt backlog; advocate clearly for capacity to address debt alongside feature delivery.

Essential Key Skills

• 5+ years of hands-on data engineering experience building and operating production data platforms in a SaaS or B2B product environment.
• Demonstrated experience using AI coding agents as a core part of your development workflow.
• Strong hands-on expertise with cloud-native data platforms, ideally Azure (Data Lake Gen2, Databricks).
• Expert-level command of the modern data stack: dbt, SQL, dimensional and source-aligned data modelling, semantic layers, and data quality frameworks.
• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with workflow orchestration (Airflow, Prefect, Databricks Workflows, or similar).
• Experience defining and consuming data contracts in collaboration with Product and Engineering teams.
• Track record of raising engineering maturity in data functions.
• Comfortable being on-call for the data platform and owning incidents end-to-end.
• Strong written communication: able to document architecture, write ADRs, and explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• Experience contributing to AI/ML infrastructure.
• Familiarity with LLM application patterns.
• Experience working within a hub-and-spoke or embedded analytics operating model.
• Prior experience as a lead engineer or tech lead on a small data team.
• SaaS or B2B product company background with exposure to product analytics and GTM data.

What We Offer

• Salary of €85,000 - €95,000, dependent on experience/location
• Health & Wellbeing Benefit Stipend
• Home Office Setup - one off £500 reimbursement, post probation
• 26 days of paid time off
• 1 additional day off for your birthday
• Service-years recognition financial reward
• Regular performance-based compensation reviews
• Growing international business with 10,000+ subscribers