Senior Data Engineer (w/m/d)

Role Summary

TL;DR

Senior Data Engineer.

Build our data foundation from v1 -> v10. Join the early core team of experienced entrepreneurs (scaled to millions of users, $100m+ exits). Build the future of tax & accounting with AI. Architect our data warehouse, build resilient pipelines, and enable our finance stack. Grow into leadership as we expand across countries. Above-market pay + meaningful equity.

How taxation, accounting and payroll work today is a pain for everyone. Still every business must do it continuously. It is the backbone that our economy runs on.

Enabled through AI, we are turning this often-painful process into a radically simple experience for our customers, so they can focus on what matters to them: growing their business.

As our first Data Engineer, you’ll be a core part of building the data architecture behind Skalar. We are past the initial founding phase, but we are still very, very early - meaning pretty much everything you touch will involve greenfield building. While we provide a world-class professional service to our customers, data is our foundation. Your work will allow our future data analysts and scientists to shine in their work.

OUR TECH STACK (GREENFIELD)

1. Prefer boring tech where it matters; innovate where it differentiates (especially in AI).
2. Our product tech stack is currently TypeScript, Next.js (React) and PostgreSQL. You will have full freedom to select the best tech stack for our data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake/BigQuery, dbt, Airflow/Dagster).
3. You’ll have a strong influence on tech, cloud, and architecture choices, specifically regarding data warehousing and orchestration.
4. Tooling budget for whatever makes you fast. No legacy, no yak‑shaving.

THE PROCESS (FAST, MEANINGFUL, NO HOMEWORK)

1. Jump on an intro call with a recruiter
2. Get to know a fellow engineer, virtually or in person (up to you)
3. Meet our whole founding team during a final interview (in-person, ~3h, incl. live coding)

Responsibilities

• 0 → 1 and Beyond: Architect and build our greenfield data warehouse from scratch; take data infrastructure end-to-end.
• Core Data Pipelines: Build resilient ETL/ELT pipelines to fetch, clean, and transform massive amounts of financial data from messy third-party APIs and integrations.
• Integrity & Security: Establish rigorous data governance, quality checks, and security protocols to ensure absolute data integrity for highly sensitive financial & employee information.
• Leadership: Hire and mentor junior engineers (if interested); gain leadership experience as we grow.

Requirements

• 5+ years of data engineering experience, with a standout track record of scaling modern data infrastructure (such as BigQuery, Snowflake, Looker and dbt)
• A bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science or a related field
• You have expert-level SQL skills, strong programming skills in Python and proven experience setting up modern cloud data warehouses and orchestration tools
• You have deep experience dealing with complex third-party APIs, rate limits and asynchronous data fetching
• You have experience with agent frameworks (such as LangChain) and RAG pipelines, and you use AI for nearly all coding tasks
• Very good written and verbal communication skills in English (min. C1), German is a plus
• You have a valid work permit to work in Germany

Benefits

• Unique opportunity to join a company very early which you can shape
• Rapid growth path: Grow your career with the growing, AI-first company
• Perfect environment to develop relevant skills in a world of AI
• Above-market compensation + equity package, that has the potential to drastically gain in value

About the Company

We are a team of experienced entrepreneurs who have scaled businesses to 10s of millions of users, 10s of millions in revenue, multiple countries, and 9-digit exits - and we are just getting started. We are backed by leading venture investors and expanding rapidly.