Data Engineer (Freelance) | Amsterdam

Data Engineer (Freelance) | Amsterdam

📍 Netherlands

💻 Hybrid

💰 Freelance opportunity

🌍 EU working rights required

A product-led team is looking for a Freelance Data Engineer to help redesign and build a more scalable, general-purpose data lake that supports both reporting and insight generation. This role sits in a Learning & Insights environment where the current setup is too reporting-focused, so they need someone who can help create a cleaner, more flexible data foundation for the future.

You’d be joining at a key moment, where the goal is not just to maintain pipelines, but to improve the wider data architecture and make it far easier for internal teams to access reliable, well-structured data. It’s a hands-on role with a good level of ownership and a nice mix of engineering, quality, and platform thinking.

Start: ASAP | Freelance contract

What you'll be doing:

• Designing and building scalable data pipelines (ETL/ELT, batch and streaming)
• Helping architect a general-purpose data lake fit for diverse use cases
• Implementing CI/CD workflows for data jobs via GitHub Actions
• Setting up monitoring, alerting, and data quality checks
• Documenting data lineage and contributing to governance practices

Must-haves:

• 3+ years of data engineering experience
• Strong Python and SQL
• Hands-on with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or Databricks)
• GitHub + GitHub Actions experience
• Solid understanding of data modeling (star schema, dimensional, SCD), OLTP vs OLAP, and testing practices

Nice to have:

• AWS Glue, Athena, DynamoDB, Step Functions
• Medallion architecture, Iceberg/Delta/Hudi table formats
• PySpark or Golang
• Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation)

Not the right fit if you're: primarily a BI/dashboard specialist, ML-focused, or coming from legacy ETL tools only (Informatica, SSIS etc.) without modern cloud experience.