Lead Data Engineer

Job Description

THE OPPORTUNITY IN A NUTSHELL

• You? A collaborative data professional who loves mentoring teams, setting clean architectural standards, and transforming data into highly reliable products.
• Role? A hands-on Lead Data Engineer with broad organizational scope, bridging the gap between high-level data strategy and day-to-day product engineering.
• Tech stack? Event-driven architectures (Kafka, CDC), schema management, and modern cloud data platforms like GCP/BigQuery or Snowflake.
• Company? Vend, home of FINN, Blocket, Tori, Oikotie, DBA & Bilbasen, where millions of people across the Nordics connect to find what they need, whether it’s a job, a home, a way to move, or a fresh start.
• Location? Join us in our Krakow office with the flexibility to work 3 days per week remotely.
• Why us? This is your chance to make a profound impact by scaling our Data Mesh strategy across Vend's four core product verticals: Mobility, Real Estate, Jobs, and Recommerce. You will enjoy extensive professional growth, a culture built on mutual trust and psychological safety, and the autonomy to shape data maturity across a major Nordic technology ecosystem.

WHO ARE YOU?

• You bring deep expertise in event-driven architecture, including Kafka topic design, Change Data Capture (CDC), schema evolution, and both streaming and batch patterns.
• You have practical experience navigating cloud data platforms (such as GCP/BigQuery or Snowflake) alongside data quality frameworks and observability tools.
• You are a natural educator and coach who enjoys introducing modern data practices to product teams, meeting them where they are with patience and clarity.
• You thrive in a federated data ownership model (like Data Mesh) and feel comfortable guiding, aligning, and influencing cross-functional peers without needing direct authority.
• You are an effective communicator in English, which is our primary working language, enabling you to clearly translate technical "how-to" choices into meaningful "why" business value.

WHAT’S THE JOB LIKE?

As a Lead Data Engineer, your mission is to bring our data strategy to life within your product organization. You will ensure our data products are architecturally sound, thoroughly documented, and highly usable for downstream consumers, not just technically present.

Your Typical Week

You will balance your time between deep technical reviews and collaborative human alignment. One day you might be diving into event schemas and Kafka topic designs; the next, you’ll be coaching a product team through their very first data product or collaborating with central platform teams to keep standards uniform.

Current Projects & Focus Areas

• Championing the Data Operating Model: Serve as the core checkpoint for our Data Operating Model within your vertical, tracking progress against company-wide data product coverage goals.
• Team Enablement: Guide teams end-to-end, from initial event emission through our golden paths to a discoverable product in our data catalog.
• Lifecycle Management: Own the healthy evolution of your organization's data products, smoothly managing versioning, breaking changes, and deprecations.

Collaboration & Stakeholders

You will report directly to the CTO of your vertical while operating under the CPTO’s overarching data mandate. You will collaborate closely with peer Lead Data Engineers across Vend, our central platform infrastructure teams, and the product managers and engineers within your specific organization.

What Success Looks Like:

• After 6 months: You have built trusted relationships across your vertical, assessed current data product gaps, and successfully established initial quality and observability baselines.
• After 1 year: You have proven the success of our data strategy by delivering data products that actively drive revenue, optimize user experiences, or reduce time-to-insight across your vertical.

WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT (to give you total clarity):

• Not a platform engineer: You won’t be building Kafka clusters or maintaining Snowflake infrastructure our dedicated central platform team handles that heavy lifting.
• Not an analytics engineer: You won’t own dbt models or build dashboards. Your focus is ensuring the foundation feeding the analytical layer is rock solid.
• Not a people manager: This is an individual contributor (IC) role focused on broad organizational influence, mentorship, and technical leadership rather than administration.

GOT YOUR ATTENTION?

We’re excited to start hearing from candidates now. Due to the summer holiday period and hiring manager availability, we are currently sourcing candidates and will begin shortlisting and moving selected candidates forward from mid-August.

We work in a hybrid way and would like to catch up with you at our vibrant and colourful office in Kraków 2 days per week. This allows for collaboration and meaningful connections with the team. If you’re not the working-from-home kind of person, you are of course welcome in our office every day!