Staff Data Engineer - Gaming (Latam)

About the Role

This is a contractor role through X-Team; open to candidates based in Latam. You'll own the data pipelines that business teams rely on for their numbers. Much of the job starts with untangling what's already there: older Airflow DAGs, duplicate ETLs, and business logic that lives in people's heads. You'll make sense of it, rationalize it, and replace it with a proper build.

That includes designing a dbt warehouse from scratch, with star and snowflake schemas, on top of a Medallion lakehouse (Bronze, Silver, Gold) in Databricks and PySpark. You'll work directly with analysts and business stakeholders to get the logic out of them and lock it into data contracts. When the first request isn't the right one, you'll propose better alternatives.

Ingestion runs through CDC, APIs, and web scrapers, orchestrated in Airflow on Astronomer and shipped through CI/CD. A lot of the work is ambiguous, and you'll often run with it on your own. You'll also join the on-call rotation, which includes incident response around big events. The team is AI-first, so you'll use Claude Code, ChatGPT, or Cursor daily while keeping code clean and documentation short and written by a person.

Most Important 5+ years of experience building and owning production data pipelines end to end. Advanced SQL, including writing and optimizing complex queries and joins on large datasets. Production programming experience in Python , or in another data engineering language such as Scala, Java, Kotlin, or C#. Databricks and PySpark experience at production scale.

Warehouse modeling in dbt , including star and snowflake schema design and building a warehouse from scratch. Experience untangling legacy pipelines, such as older Airflow DAGs and duplicate ETLs, and rationalizing them into a cleaner design. Experience working directly with analysts and business stakeholders to extract business logic, define data contracts, and push back with alternatives.

Experience ingesting data through CDC, REST or GraphQL APIs, and relational or NoSQL databases such as Postgres or MongoDB. Experience orchestrating pipelines with Airflow and deploying through CI/CD. Daily, hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, ChatGPT, or Cursor. Ability to maintain a minimum 6-hour daily working overlap with standard US time zones (PST/EST), along with active participation in an on-call rotation to maintain pipeline health and reliability.

Nice to Have

Streaming experience with Kafka or Flink. Experience with Snowflake, BigQuery, or open table formats such as Delta Lake or Iceberg. Experience building and maintaining web scrapers in production. Experience with Astronomer, Dagster, or Prefect. Personal Traits You're comfortable with ambiguity and can make progress before every requirement is defined.

You come back with your own solutions. You can turn messy code and scattered business logic into a proper build. You work well on your own, and you take direction when it's given. You're willing to play and understand games on a granular level.