Senior Data Engineer

Founded in 2001, Resident Advisor (RA) is one of the world's longest-running music media brands and a cornerstone of the dance, electronic and DJ ecosystem. The site's audience of over 7 million monthly users is drawn in by a combination of news, editorial, club listings and ticketing, RA-branded events at venues and festivals worldwide, original films and a weekly mix series that has run for 20 years. 

Purpose of the role:

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to own the stability, scalability, and correctness of our data platform. This is a foundational hire. The platform works today, but it has not been stress-tested, and several of the controls that a scaling business needs, around security, governance, and warehouse design, are not yet in place.

You will be the person who changes that. You will inherit a functioning ETL pipeline built on top of Meltano and dbt, utilising a PostgesSQL data warehouse on AWS and an engaged team. You will be expected to make the hard architectural calls that determine whether the platform can grow without rework. The right candidate will not just maintain our data systems, but make our foundations solid, make the platform AI-compatible, and make the engineering team confident in what they are building on.

Key responsibilities:

• Design, scale, and optimise the data warehouse as a foundation for both BI and AI. Make the architectural decisions that ensure the platform supports future ML use cases without rework.
• Own pipeline reliability end-to-end: monitor health, handle failures, build alerting frameworks, and maintain SLAs across all data ingestion.
• Implement and maintain GDPR controls, including PII masking, hashing, and row-level security, making compliance a routine, engineered part of the stack.
• Define data contracts between producers and consumers, and use dbt lineage to run impact analysis before changes reach production.
• Build and maintain the dbt Semantic Layer so that business metrics are defined once and reported consistently across the organisation.
• Write the tests, the documentation, and the runbooks that make this platform operable by the whole team.
• Implement Slim CI and safe dev-to-prod workflows, and raise the overall engineering standard around deployment and change management.
• Work closely with Engineering, Product and Data Analytics to align on business objectives and build the optimal solutions for RA.

We’re Looking For

• Ideally +5 years hands-on experience designing and scaling a data warehouse with engineering best practices, ideally PostgreSQL or similar. You have done this before, not just read about it.
• Deep proficiency in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure). You understand how to leverage managed services to build scalable, resilient data infrastructure
• Strong dbt skills: incremental models, Jinja macros, Semantic Layer, and the judgment to know when not to use dbt.
• Expert-level SQL. You don’t just write queries; you optimize them. You are comfortable diving into execution plans, identifying indexing bottlenecks, and refactoring complex logic to minimize compute costs and maximize throughput.
• Experience architecting BI solutions: You’ve deployed and managed tools like Metabase, Tableau or PowerBI, focusing on creating intuitive, high-performance data environments for end-users.
• Practical experience with data governance and GDPR compliance in an engineering context: PII handling, row-level security, data contracts.
• A track record of building pipelines that don't break quietly. You think about failure modes before they happen.
• AI awareness : You understand how architectural choices impact downstream ML. You know how to structure data to support future use cases like feature engineering and LLM orchestration (e.g., RAG).
• The ability to write clearly and document thoroughly. This role is as much about making the platform legible as it is about making it fast.
• Experience working in a small, cross-functional team where you are expected to own decisions end-to-end.

What we offer you:

• Generous annual leave policies aimed at promoting work-life balance.
• Flexibility in working arrangements, offering hybrid or remote work options based on role requirements and location. 
• Matching pension schemes and/or 401k.
• Comprehensive staff wellbeing initiatives, featuring regular activities and workplace programmes to support mental and physical health. This includes discounted Classpass memberships, and custom-fitted earplugs.
• Company-led social events, team lunches, and discounts on RA merch.
• Paid annual volunteering allowance, encouraging contributions to community projects and charities you care about.
• Regular company-wide Q&A’s with senior leadership, along with ongoing virtual educational training sessions for all staff.
• A transparent internal company culture committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (see: https://ra.co/about/diversity).
• Active involvement in community projects within the electronic music community (see:  https://ra.co/about/community).

More about RA:

As an independent company run by devoted dance music enthusiasts, our mission is to bring together the world's electronic music communities. Our Global Content Network (GCN) and international teams help us establish connections with hyper-niche local scenes. 

We became B-Corp certified in 2024, which counts us among businesses leading a global movement for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy and part of a community that meets high social and environmental impact standards.

We especially welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds, abilities, ethnicities, experiences, gender identities, and sexual orientations. We aim for our team to reflect the communities we engage with. We ensure everyone is valued and respected by actively promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion in our workplace.

Our values:

• Electronic music is art.
• We celebrate the progressive values that underpin electronic music.
• We advocate for a more inclusive and equitable electronic music community.
• We honour the past, present and future of electronic music.
• We use innovation to empower the community.
• We choose honesty over gain and purpose over profit.
• We're always front left.

This role is a full-time position, based in Madrid. Please note: This position requires applicants to be based in Madrid and to work from the office three days per week. The annual salary range for this role is €45,000 - €65,000 If you have questions about the role, please contact work@ra.co.

This listing will be open for a minimum of two weeks from the 20th February. Please be sure to add work@ra.co to your contacts and check your junk/spam folder for emails from us.