About the role
How do you build a reliable pipeline when the tools haven't even been chosen yet? As Senior Data Engineer at Budget Thuis, you'll help lay the technical foundation for how a Dutch energy supplier uses its data, from warehouse to orchestration, and be one of the more experienced voices in the room while we figure it out.
Responsibilities
•Help evaluate and choose the tools for our data stack: data warehouse, ELT, and orchestration — and make architecture-level calls together with your manager, not just implement someone else's design.
•Build and maintain data pipelines, and mentor and unblock your peer day-to-day, without formal management responsibility.
•Add data quality checks to every pipeline change: null checks, row counts, schema validation, and dbt tests (or equivalent) as standard practice, not an extra step.
•Break your work into small, deployable increments and keep pull requests focused.
•Monitor pipeline outputs after every deployment and keep the codebase easy to work with.
•Respond quickly to pipeline failures, investigate the root cause, and escalate when an issue is bigger than the two of you.
•Review pull requests with constructive feedback, pair with your peer on complex or unfamiliar work, and help set the technical bar the team grows on.
•Communicate early when changes affect downstream consumers such as BI, ML, or customers, and prioritize based on customer impact.
•Share what you've learned from past platform builds — including what you'd do differently — and help translate that into how this team works.
Requirements
•10 years of hands-on experience building and maintaining production data pipelines in a modern cloud data stack: a cloud data warehouse, dbt (or equivalent), and an orchestration tool such as Airflow or Dagster.
•Comfortable making architecture-level calls together with your manager, not just implementing someone else's designs.
•Experience navigating a platform that was still being actively built or migrated — not a settled, mature stack — and can speak concretely to what that was like.
•Comfortable writing tests and embedding data quality checks as a natural part of your work, not an afterthought.
•A track record of shipping incrementally: you prefer simple, working solutions over over-engineered ones.
•Solid collaboration skills, including the ability to mentor and unblock a less experienced peer day-to-day, without needing a formal title to do it.
•Curiosity about the business behind the data: you want to understand how your pipelines connect to real outcomes for customers and colleagues in the energy sector.
Nice to have
•Experience with Azure cloud services (Data Lake, Databricks, Event Hubs)
•Exposure to data governance tools such as lineage, cataloging, or quality monitoring
•Domain knowledge in utilities, energy, or telco
•Experience working alongside a BI team
•Experience working in a small team (fewer than 3 people)
Benefits
•A gross monthly salary of €6.500,- to €7.800,- based on a 40-hour workweek
•13th month salary
•Budget Summer Holiday: every Friday off in July and August (9 extra days)
•1 paid volunteering day per year
•25 holiday days, with the option to buy 1.5 extra weeks
•Pension: 16% of gross salary incl. holiday allowance (11% Budget Thuis, 5% own contribution)
•Monthly ClassPass credits
•Travel: Swapfiets or NS Business Card, your choice
•Free mobile and internet subscription from Budget Thuis
•Hybrid working (50/50)
•1 month per year fully remote
•Free access to OpenUp for mental health and courses
