Databricks Data Engineer

Location: Madrid, Spain – Hybrid
Work Hours: Swiss/Spanish business hours
Experience: 6–10+ years
Engagement: Contract ( 6 months with extensions)
Start: Immediate / ASAP

The Opportunity

We are looking for a highly hands‑on Senior Databricks Data Engineer to design, build, and optimize scalable end‑to‑end data pipelines.

This role is best suited to an engineer who is comfortable writing PySpark/Python code independently, working with large datasets, integrating multiple data sources, and taking data from initial ingestion through Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers using Medallion Architecture.

This is not a coordination‑only or architecture‑only position. We are specifically seeking someone who remains hands‑on with Databricks, Spark, PySpark, Python and SQL.

Key Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain scalable Databricks‑based data pipelines.

Build end‑to‑end data engineering solutions from source ingestion through Gold‑layer datasets.

Develop high‑performance data processing workflows using PySpark, Python, Spark and SQL.

Integrate data from multiple sources, including APIs, databases, files, cloud storage and external platforms.

Design and optimize Databricks architectures for data ingestion, transformation, processing and storage.

Work with large‑scale datasets and distributed data processing environments.

Perform Spark/Databricks performance tuning to improve processing speed, scalability and cost efficiency.

Build robust ETL/ELT workflows with appropriate data quality, monitoring and governance controls.

Optimize Databricks workflows, jobs and compute resources.

Troubleshoot pipeline performance, reliability and data‑quality issues.

Collaborate with Data Architects, Data Engineers and business stakeholders to translate requirements into production‑ready data solutions.

Contribute to engineering standards and Databricks best practices.

Mandatory Technical Skills

you demonstrate strong production‑level experience with:

Databricks

Python

Advanced SQL

Medallion Architecture – Bronze, Silver and Gold

Data ingestion from APIs, databases, files and multiple source systems

Large‑scale/distributed data processing

Data transformation and aggregation

Databricks/Spark performance tuning and optimization

Data quality and pipeline monitoring

Cloud‑based data engineering environments

Highly Desirable

Experience with some of the following would be advantageous:

AWS: S3, Glue ETL, Lambda, Step Functions, ECS, CloudWatch

Snowflake

DBT

Terraform

BigQuery

Kafka

Git / Jenkins / CI/CD

Data governance

Cost monitoring and cloud optimization

Infrastructure as Code

Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate or similar Databricks certification is considered an asset.

Ideal Candidate

You are a strong fit if you have personally designed and coded production data pipelines rather than primarily managing other engineers.

You should be able to clearly explain a recent project where you:

and describe the PySpark/Python code, transformations, architecture decisions, performance improvements and data‑quality controls you personally implemented.

Technical Screening Questions

Shortlisted candidates should be prepared to discuss:

1. Databricks / Medallion Architecture:
Walk us through a production pipeline you personally built from source ingestion through Bronze, Silver and Gold. What did you personally code?

2. PySpark:
Describe a PySpark pipeline you developed for a large dataset. What transformations did you implement, and how did you optimize its performance?

3. Performance:
A Databricks/Spark job that previously completed in 20 minutes now takes 90 minutes. How would you diagnose and optimize it?

4. Data Ingestion:
How have you ingested data from APIs, relational databases, files or cloud storage into Databricks?

5. Data Quality:
How do you implement data‑quality validation, error handling, monitoring and recovery within a production data pipeline?

6. Optimization:
Give an example where you reduced Databricks/cloud processing costs or significantly improved pipeline performance.

Important: We are prioritizing hands‑on engineers, not candidates whose recent experience is primarily management, coordination or high‑level architecture.