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# Lead Data Engineer

- **Company:** Walker Sands
- **Location:** Boston, MA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $155,000.0 - $175,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Business Systems, Software as a Service, Information Engineering, Data Governance, Extract Transform Load (ETL), Document-Oriented Databases, Google Analytics, Python (Programming Language), Operational Databases, Salesforce.Com, Systems Integration, Web Analytics, Sql Optimization, Snowflake, Agentic-AI, Claude, Hubspot, Google Gemini, GPT
- **Published:** October 22, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=ef97074dd92f2f25

## About the Role

You've spent 7+ years in data engineering, enough of it in lean environments where you owned real things without much hand-holding. You can go deep on a broken pipeline in the morning and talk through a roadmap tradeoff in the afternoon, and you're good at both. You are a clear communicator, and work to understand needs beyond the technical with empathy and a 'here's what's possible' mindset.

You find problems, fix them, document them, and explain them without making them more complicated than they need to be.
*

 + 7+ years in data or analytics engineering, including time as the lead or senior technical owner on a production data platform
 + Deep, hands-on Snowflake experience
 + Strong dbt, advanced SQL, and working Python
 + Experience integrating SaaS and marketing APIs (ad platforms, GA4, Salesforce, HubSpot) through ELT tools and custom pipelines
 + A track record of shaping technical direction, not just executing tickets
 + Clear communication with technical and non-technical people alike
Strong Pluses

 + Agency or B2B marketing data background
 + Data governance and privacy experience (role-based access, masking, consent data)
 + Experience making data usable for AI and LLM-driven tools
 + Experience leading or mentoring others
 + Comfortable using AI like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and bringing new ways of working within the data and privacy guardrails of the business

## Description

* Build and maintain pipelines and dbt models in Snowflake that are tested, documented, and trusted
 * Integrate data from paid media, web analytics, SEO, CRM, and business systems using tools like Fivetran or Airbyte and direct APIs
 * Find and fix breaks at the root, before an account team or client finds them
 * Maintain data governance: access controls, privacy, and consent requirements
 * Structure and document data so AI agents can use it reliable: clear semantic layers, consistent definitions, and metadata that tells an agent what a table or metric actually means
 * Build governed access patterns for agentic tools (scoped, read-only, permission aware) so agents only query the data they're allowed to, and their answers can be traced back to the source

Strategy + Partnership

 * Work with the SVP, DATA on architecture, roadmap, and build-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions
 * Translate business and client needs into data designs that hold up, and push back when a request won't
 * Make data usable for analysts, reporting, and AI-driven tools through well-modeled, well-governed layers

Team Leadership

 * Build and lead a small data support team handling tier 1 and tier 2 triage, including the playbooks and escalation paths behind it
 * Eventually build out the team as needed for various functions to drive better accuracy, performance and data tools for the business