Senior Data Engineer

Job Title: Senior Data Engineer. Location: Jersey City, NJ (On-site). Employment Type: Contract (W2 through ZipStaff — No C2C or 1099). About the Opportunity ZipStaff is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to build and operate enterprise data pipelines for a leading healthcare analytics organization supporting financial and accounting platforms. This role requires expert-level Apache Airflow , dbt Core , and production Kubernetes / OpenShift . General ETL or warehouse-only engineers without orchestration and container depth will not be a fit. What You’ll Do: Design, build, and maintain complex Airflow DAGs (batch and event-driven). Tune DAG performance, dependencies, retries, SLAs, and alerting. Optimize Airflow scheduler, executor, and workers for high-concurrency workloads. Lead dbt Core implementation: project structure, environments, and CI/CD. Design staging / intermediate / mart models, tests, docs, macros, and incremental models. Optimize dbt/SQL performance for large datasets and downstream reporting. Deploy and run data workloads on Kubernetes / OpenShift . Set CPU/memory requests and limits, autoscaling, and pod scheduling. Troubleshoot container performance and resource contention. Monitor end-to-end pipeline health; add logs, metrics, and alerts. Partner with architects, platform engineers, and business stakeholders. Support financial reporting, accounting, and regulated data use cases. Enforce data-engineering standards, security, and governance. Required Qualifications: 10+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data platform engineering. Expert-level Apache Airflow (DAG design, scheduling, performance tuning). Expert-level dbt Core (modeling, testing, macros, production implementation). Strong Python for data engineering and automation. Production Kubernetes and/or OpenShift for data workloads. Strong SQL for complex transformations. Experience with distributed workload management and performance tuning. Cloud data platforms, containerized deploys, CI/CD, and Git. Ability to work on-site in Jersey City, NJ. Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future. Preferred Qualifications: Financial services or accounting data platforms. Enterprise migrations from legacy systems to a modern data stack. Data warehouse experience, including Oracle. About ZipStaff ZipStaff partners with leading organizations to connect skilled technology professionals with high-impact contract opportunities. We focus on quality matches and long-term success. #J-18808-Ljbffr ZipStaff Inc.