Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer

Kenect is on a mission to revolutionize customer communication and engagement for businesses across North America. Founded with a deep understanding of the challenges businesses face in connecting with their customers, Kenect helps companies streamline communication, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive growth through its innovative messaging and reputation platform. Trusted by thousands of businesses, our passionate team is committed to building technology that fosters closer connections and helps businesses thrive in a digital-first world.

The Lead Data Engineer will lead the development of Kenect's data ecosystem, including architecting and implementing a customer data platform. This platform will unify batch and real-time data from sources such as DMS, CRMs, social networks, and web traffic to create comprehensive 360-degree customer profiles. You will work closely with a product manager to ensure the data initiatives are aligned with the product roadmap, building the right data products that are prioritized to deliver customer-facing value. Together with engineers, analysts, and data scientists, you will enable data-driven insights and power advanced digital initiatives like real-time personalization, predictive modeling, and targeted marketing campaigns.

In this role, you will help to define the architecture, tools, and strategy for data pipelines, data lakes, cloud data warehousing, and integrations with marketing automation tools. Your work will directly support Kenect's mission to transform the customer experience at tens of thousands of dealerships.

What you will be doing:

• Designing and implementing scalable batch and real-time data pipelines using tools like Fivetran, dbt, Apache Spark, and Airflow.
• Architecting and managing a data lake and cloud data warehouse solutions (e.g., BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks).
• Building and optimizing streaming data pipelines with tools such as GCP Pub/Sub, Kafka, or AWS SNS to support real-time data processing.
• Developing integrations with Customer Data Platforms (e.g., Twilio Segment, RudderStack) and marketing automation systems.
• Collaborating with engineers, analysts, and data scientists to build data solutions that support advanced use cases like real-time personalization, predictive scoring, and segmentation.
• Ensuring all data initiatives are aligned with the product roadmap and prioritized to deliver measurable value for customers.
• Defining strategies for multi-tenant SaaS data solutions to ensure scalability, performance, and security.
• Leading technical initiatives to adopt new technologies and best practices for data engineering.
• Ensuring data quality, governance, and compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Skills & Qualifications:

• 8+ years of professional experience in data engineering, with a focus on batch and streaming data architectures.
• Expertise in building scalable data pipelines and data processing frameworks.
• Proficiency in Python and modern ETL tools like GCP Cloud Dataflow, Fivetran, dbt, and Apache Spark.
• Experience with cloud-based data platforms (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks).
• Strong understanding of CDPs and tools like Twilio Segment or RudderStack.
• Hands-on experience with streaming tools like GCP Pub/Sub, Kafka, or AWS SNS is highly desirable.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architecture is a strong plus.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative approach to solving complex problems.

What Kenect Offers:

• Health, Dental, Vision, Life & Disability Insurance
• Your birthday is a paid day off
• Onsite gym
• Breakroom full of snacks and drinks
• Convenient location next to freeway entrance/exit

We believe in hiring self-motivated team members who can run alongside us without needing to be "managed" along the way. Yes, we have managers and 1:1s. Yes, we believe in giving open two-way feedback. We also believe in having team members who can run without the daily guidance that some companies prefer.

Kenect is an equal opportunity employer. We are an organization comprised of people of all kinds of backgrounds, and we believe this mix is precisely what makes us strong. All employment decisions at Kenect are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications without regard to race, color, religion or belief, family or parental status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.