Sr. Data Engineer - W2 Contract

Role: Senior Data Engineer - Airflow, DBT Core, Kubernetes/OpenShift Location: Jersey City, NJ, Hybrid 3 days a week in the office Looking for Permanent / Visa Independent Consultants MUST HAVE SKILLS are Kubernetes operations, Airflow design and implementation, and hands-on DBT model development in an on-prem OpenShift environment. MUST HAVE SKILLS • 10+ years of professional experience in data engineering, designing and supporting enterprise-scale data platforms in production environments • the role requires hands-on experience with DBT and Apache Airflow deployed on Kubernetes, specifically within an on-prem OpenShift environment. • This position involves closer interaction with infrastructure, including Kubernetes operations, Airflow design and implementation, and hands-on DBT model development in an on-prem setup. • Given these requirements, we are looking for someone with deeper, practical experience in dbt and Airflow within Kubernetes-based, on-prem environments. Job Summary We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Data Engineer with 8-10+ years of hands-on experience in enterprise data engineering, including deep expertise in Apache Airflow DAG development, dbt Core modeling and implementation, and cloud-native container platforms (Kubernetes / OpenShift). This role is critical to building, operating, and optimizing scalable data pipelines that support financial and accounting platforms, including enterprise system migrations and high-volume data processing workloads. The ideal candidate will have extensive hands-on experience in workflow orchestration, data modeling, performance tuning, and distributed workload management in containerized environments. Required Skills & Qualifications: • 10+ years of professional experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or platform engineering roles • Proven experience designing and supporting enterprise-scale data platforms in production environments • Expert-level Apache Airflow (DAG design, scheduling, performance tuning) • Expert-level DBT Core (data modeling, testing, macros, implementation) • Strong proficiency in Python for data engineering and automation • Deep understanding of Kubernetes and/or OpenShift in production environments • Extensive experience with distributed workload management and performance optimization • Strong SQL skills for complex transformations and analytics • Experience running data platforms on cloud environments • Familiarity with containerized deployments, CI/CD pipelines, and Git-based workflows • Experience supporting financial services or accounting platforms is plus • Exposure to enterprise system migrations (e.g., legacy platform to modern data stack) is plus • Experience with data warehouses (Oracle) is plus