GCP Data - Lead Engineer

5–8 years hands-on experience as a Data Engineer on Google Cloud Platform with fluency in both German and English, guiding the migration team through a large-scale legacy-to-GCP data and application migration

Go-to expert on GCP data pipelines; helps the team design, build, and validate scalable data workflows using Big Query, Dataproc, and Cloud Composer.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as SME on GCP data engineering patterns — Dataproc (Spark/Hadoop) jobs, Cloud Composer (Airflow) DAGs, and BigQuery data models used in the target architecture
• Guide the migration team in re-platforming legacy ETL/data warehouse jobs onto GCP, including orchestration design, job scheduling, and dependency mapping in Composer
• Design and build Dataproc pipelines to process and transform migrated data, ensuring parity with legacy business logic
• Collaborate with data engineers and migration leads to troubleshoot discrepancies during testing and validation of migrated pipelines
• Optimize BigQuery performance (partitioning, clustering, query design) and Dataproc cluster/job configuration for cost and efficiency

Required Skills

• Fluency in both German and English
• Hands-on experience with core GCP data services — BigQuery, Dataproc, Cloud Composer (Airflow), Cloud Storage
• Strong Python and/or PySpark skills for building and maintaining data pipelines
• Solid understanding of Airflow DAG design, scheduling, and dependency management
• Experience with SQL and data modeling for analytical workloads

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Prior experience on a legacy-to-cloud data migration project
• Familiarity with legacy ETL tools (Ab Initio) or on-prem data warehouses for migration context
• Experience with CI/CD for data pipelines (Cloud Build, Terraform)
• Exposure to job scheduling tools such as UC4, and relational databases (Oracle, SQL Server)

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)