About the Role
Help build the platform that keeps European data under European control! As a Senior Sovereign Data Platform Engineer, you build and manage data platforms based on open-source components, so our clients' data and data processing remain under their own control. You design the platform, deploy it on their own servers (on-premises), with a European cloud provider or at a hyperscaler, and ensure that the teams building on it can work quickly without having to deal with the technical foundations.
Responsibilities
•Design and build sovereign data platforms based on open-source components, and make the stack choices explicit (Iceberg with Lakekeeper or Polaris vs. DuckLake, Trino vs. Spark vs. an MPP engine).
•Deploy the platform on Kubernetes or OpenShift across on-premises, EU cloud and hyperscaler environments, using a single declarative deployment path.
•Make it observable with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Thanos and OpenTelemetry.
•Build the governance layer: identity management through Keycloak, fine-grained access control with Open Policy Agent or OpenFGA, and discovery and lineage in OpenMetadata or DataHub.
•Safeguard the exit path: keep table formats, catalogs and engines independently replaceable, and maintain a dependency mirror.
•Act as the technical point of contact for the client, provide technical direction to projects and work as a programmer every day within the team.
Requirements
•At least 5 years of experience as a data or platform engineer, complemented by a completed bachelor's or master's degree.
•Experience bringing platforms into production, monitoring them and managing them.
•In-depth, hands-on experience with Kubernetes or OpenShift in production — from setting up and upgrading clusters to GitOps delivery, operators and platform networking (ingress, TLS, DNS, CNI).
•Experience with a modern data lakehouse stack based on open table formats (Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake), a query engine (Trino, Spark or DuckDB), object storage (MinIO or Ceph) and orchestration (Airflow or Dagster), data transformation with dbt and data reporting with, for example, Superset or Metabase.
•An eye for platform governance: secret management, OIDC identity, fine-grained authorization and a robust observability stack.
•A clear preference for open-source and vendor-independent architectures, including an affinity with the related licensing and governance issues.
•Programming skills in Python and SQL and excellent command of the English language.
Nice to Have
•Knowledge of metadata management with OpenMetadata.
•Go.
Conditions
•Gross monthly salary between €4,799 and €6,719 (based on 40 hours), excluding 8% holiday pay and profit sharing.
•Flexible working week (32, 36 or 40 hours) and the possibility of hybrid working.
•NS Business Card or mileage allowance.
•Work-from-home and internet allowance, plus a budget for an ergonomic home workspace.
•Personal development budget and access to training, coaching and certifications.
•Tech Talks, MeetUps, in-house Hackathons, team outings, summer festival and end-of-year party. And more!
