Senior Data Engineer (Lead)

Punt is a Vancouver-based, founder-led technology company behind two of the largest social casinos in North America. We're evolving into a super app that brings social gaming and exciting new verticals together in one experience. Our backend already handles high-volume, real-money transactions at scale. We're building toward a new category: the most advanced and engaging social gaming platform in the world.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join our Data Spine function. The team owns the canonical event contract, the warehouse, the certified data layer and the serving layer. Every other data function depends on it. When anyone at Punt quotes a number, it comes from here.

As the team's technical lead, you'll own that foundation and set its technical direction. This is a hands-on role: you'll write production code, make architecture decisions, own the technical roadmap and help grow the team. You'll keep today's platform reliable while shaping what comes next: a modern lakehouse and data that AI and new products can build on.

It's ideal for someone with good judgement about scope, who can trace a wrong number end to end, is comfortable being the source of truth when a definition is commercially contested, and values shipped and documented over elegant and pending.

What You'll Do

• Lead the technical direction of the Data Spine function, including architecture, roadmap planning, and the evolution toward a scalable lakehouse platform.
• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines that process high-volume event streams from the product, third-party game providers, payment systems, and marketing sources.
• Own the medallion architecture (bronze → silver → gold) and certified data models, ensuring data is clean, consistent, and provides one version of the truth across the business.
• Partner with analytics, AI, engineering, and business teams to define data contracts, event schemas, and shared data standards.
• Own platform administration and governance, including access management, PII masking, performance, cost, and security.
• Implement and maintain data quality checks, alerting, and observability across ingestion and transformation pipelines.
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for data pipeline availability and freshness.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and set engineering standards through design and code reviews.
• Document data contracts, pipeline architecture, and operational runbooks.

What You Bring

• 7+ years of professional data engineering experience, including 2+ years in a technical lead or platform ownership role.
• Proven experience leading a data platform migration or major re-architecture through to completion.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with dimensional modelling, including dbt (or equivalent) in production.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python for data engineering, and with pipeline orchestration tools such as Prefect, Airflow, or Dagster.
• Experience owning a cloud data warehouse or lakehouse end to end, including access management, cost, and performance (AWS preferred).
• Experience defining business-critical metrics and communicating them clearly to non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Skills & Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, or Iceberg.
• Experience with data governance, PII handling, and compliance in regulated or audit-sensitive environments.
• Experience with streaming and CDC ingestion patterns, or low-latency data serving.
• Experience with data contracts, data cataloging, or lineage tools.
• Familiarity with semantic or metrics layers, or building data products for AI and LLM use cases.
• Exposure to feature stores or ML data infrastructure.
• Familiarity with marketing attribution data (e.g., GA4, mobile measurement partners, affiliate platforms).
• Experience in gaming, social casino, fintech, or high-volume transactional data environments.
• Experience mentoring or leading engineers.

Why You'll Love this Job

• Own the ingestion backbone of a fast-growing gaming platform - your work is the foundation everything else is built on.
• Work inside a clearly defined Data Spine function where reliability, quality, and governance are the priorities - not context-switching across analytics and modeling.
• Help build the data platform from its current state into a scalable, well-governed lakehouse architecture.
• Collaborate closely with BI/Analytics and Applied AI teams who depend on your work - high visibility and high impact.
• Competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits.