Data Platform Engineer (Contract)

About the Role:

Lola Blankets is a fast-growing comfort and lifestyle brand on a mission to make the world a cozier place. We’re engaging a Data Platform Engineer on a contract basis to sit at the intersection of data and engineering – owning the analytics platform foundation while supporting the broader engineering roadmap across product, operations, and integrations.

This is a full-time contractor engagement for an initial 6-month term, with a 1-month mutual notice period and the option to convert to a full-time role based on performance and our organizational structure at that point.

You will report to the Director of Strategy & Analytics and may eventually report to our Technology Lead once that role is in place. You’ll own ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and the semantic layer, and you’ll support integrations, event pipelines, and platform infrastructure, applying a DevOps mindset to environments, deployments, and production reliability. When a dashboard number looks off, you’ll trace it through Lightdash/dbt/pipelines, find the root cause, and fix it.

We’re a lean, builder team: open-source-leaning, fast-moving, and opinionated. You’ll be expected to bring strong judgment and the execution to match.

Core Responsibilities

Data Platform & Pipeline Ownership

Own our data ingestion layer end-to-end, including completing our migration to open-source ingestion tooling (dlt) and maintaining reliability as the stack evolves

Manage dbt models, tests, documentation, and the semantic layer - the definitions that determine what every metric means across the business

Own Dagster orchestration: scheduling, retries, alerting, and failure handling across all pipeline runs

Keep Lightdash metadata, dimension/measure definitions, and access controls accurate and current

Accelerate data refresh cycles to support near-real-time operational use across the business

Data Observability & Quality

Build monitoring, failure alerting, and anomaly detection into the stack so issues surface proactively

Chase data through systems when things go wrong: trace why records drop or transform unexpectedly between source and dashboard, and resolve the root cause rather than the symptom

Establish and document data quality standards and lineage practices across the warehouse

Engineering Support & Integrations

Partner with the Director of Strategy & Analytics — and the Technology Lead once that role is filled — on platform infrastructure, system integrations, and technical initiatives where data is a core component

Build and maintain reverse ETL pipelines to push warehouse data back into operational tools

Contribute to A/B testing infrastructure and the systems that support consistent metric definitions across the org

DevOps & Platform Governance

Own separation of dev and production environments: deployment pipelines, change management, access controls, and release practices

Maintain infrastructure documentation and ensure the platform is operable beyond any single person

Qualifications

3+ years of data engineering or data platform experience - you've owned production pipelines, not just built them in a sandbox

Strong dbt skills: models, tests, sources, exposures, and the semantic layer

Solid Snowflake or equivalent cloud warehouse experience (MotherDuck is where we are likely to land shortly)

Hands-on with a modern orchestration tool (Dagster, Airflow, Prefect, or similar)

Strong Python or Typescript plus SQL - enough to read, debug, and write anything in the stack

DevOps experience: you think in terms of environments, deployments, change control, and what happens when things break in production

Open-source bias - you'd rather build and own something than pay for a managed tool that abstracts away control

Comfortable with GenAI-assisted development: using LLMs as part of your development workflow to move faster and write better code

Comfortable debugging data end-to-end - you can trace a wrong number back through the semantic layer, dbt models, and ingestion pipeline to the source

Works across team boundaries comfortably; this role sits between data and engineering and requires interfacing with leaders from both teams

Works well independently in a lean team with minimal process overhead

Experience in DTC, ecommerce, or a fast-moving consumer business a plus

Engagement Terms

Engagement type: Full-time contractor (independent contractor agreement)

Term: 6-month initial term

Notice: 1-month mutual notice period

Fee: Fixed monthly fee, set based on experience and capabilities

Conversion: Open to convert to a full-time employee role based on performance and our organization structure at the end of the term