Lead Data Engineer

About the Role

Join Zora as a Lead Data Engineer to build the critical data infrastructure powering our on-chain social network's trading platform. This is a high-impact role where you'll architect and own the end-to-end data systems that process billions of trading events, optimize liquidity, and drive real-time analytics for millions of users.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable data pipelines for ingesting, processing, and transforming high-volume, low-latency blockchain data, trading events, and user activity.
• Architect and maintain data infrastructure for real-time trading analytics, P&L calculations, leaderboards, and market cap tracking.
• Own ETL/ELT processes to transform raw on-chain data into reliable datasets for product, engineering, analytics, and ML teams.
• Build and optimize data models and schemas for both operational systems and analytical use cases.
• Establish data quality frameworks, including monitoring, alerting, and validation, to ensure pipeline reliability and data accuracy.
• Collaborate with backend engineers on event schemas, data contracts, and APIs.
• Partner with product and analytics teams to translate data needs into engineering solutions.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and establish best practices for the data platform.
• Optimize the performance and cost-efficiency of data infrastructure.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership role.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for building production data pipelines and complex data transformations.
• Extensive experience designing, building, and maintaining cloud-based data pipelines using orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, Temporal).
• Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern data stack tools.
• Deep understanding of data warehousing concepts and experience with platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including testing, CI/CD, version control, and writing maintainable code.
• Proven track record of optimizing data systems for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Nice-to-Haves

• Familiarity with DeFi, trading platforms, or financial systems.
• Experience working with blockchain data and EVM-compatible chains.
• Experience with dbt for large-scale data systems.
• Experience with Dune Analytics for querying and visualizing blockchain data.
• Experience with streaming data and event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, Flink).
• Understanding of product analytics frameworks (funnel analysis, A/B experiments).
• Knowledge of GraphQL APIs.
• Background in marketplace or two-sided platform data engineering.
• Passion for crypto, Web3, and the creator economy.