Data Engineer

• Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on site
• Employment type: Full time, permanent
• Experience: 5+ years
• Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

Job Summary

As the Data Engineer at SentraAI, you will build and operate ETL and data lake pipelines on AWS to deliver reliable data for analytics and AI.

You will be measured by reducing data-to-insight lead time to under four hours and maintaining 99.9% pipeline success across Glue and S3 ingestion.

This role is not a data scientist or a line manager for engineering teams.

About SentraAI

SentraAI is a specialist enterprise AI firm, focused on helping large, regulated organisations move AI and data platforms from experimentation into production safely and sustainably.

We work inside enterprise run-states, where governance, operational risk, change control, and long-term ownership are integral to delivery. Our teams are trusted to design and deliver systems, platforms, and operating models that can be run, audited, and evolved, not just launched.

We prioritise engineering discipline, architectural clarity, and delivery quality over speed theatre or hype.

Key Responsibilities

AWS data platform delivery

• Design and implement AWS Glue ETL jobs and workflows to ingest data from S3 and RDS into the data lake.
• Build PySpark and Python ETL pipelines to transform and curate datasets for analytics and model training.
• Author Glue schema registry entries and data contracts consumed by Databricks or Redshift tables.
• Optimize S3 partitioning, Parquet layout and lifecycle policies to control storage costs in AWS.

Pipeline orchestration and reliability

• Orchestrate pipelines with AWS Step Functions or Airflow, ensuring retries and idempotency for batch jobs.
• Implement monitoring and observability using CloudWatch, Prometheus or Grafana for pipeline metrics.
• Run incident postmortems and define SLOs to achieve 99.9% pipeline success.

Data governance and quality

• Implement automated data quality checks using Great Expectations and enforce data contracts for upstream owners.
• Manage schema evolution and table versioning for Parquet and Delta Lake consumers.
• Maintain data lineage and catalogue using AWS Glue Data Catalog or Collibra integrations.

Required Qualifications

Core capability

• Demonstrate 5+ years building production ETL pipelines on AWS including Glue and S3.
• Author Python and PySpark jobs for batch and streaming ETL at scale.
• Operate CI CD for data pipelines using Terraform, GitHub Actions or Jenkins.

Advantageous but Not Mandatory

• Experience with Kafka or Kinesis for streaming ingestion.
• Familiarity with dbt for transformations and SQL modelling.
• Knowledge of Delta Lake or Apache Iceberg table formats.
• Experience with cost optimisation and FinOps for AWS data workloads.
• Experience automating Glue job deployments with Terraform or CloudFormation.

Why Work for SentraAI

Enterprise AI, done properly. We exist to take AI and data out of experimentation and into production environments that are regulated, scrutinised, and expected to work every day.

Quality is not optional. SentraAI is built on the belief that engineering discipline, governance by design, and delivery rigour are competitive advantages, not overhead.

Clear ownership and accountability. You will be trusted with real responsibility, clear mandates, and meaningful outcomes, not diluted roles or performative activity.

Work that survives contact with reality. We design systems, operating models, and decisions that still stand up months and years after go-live, not just at demo time.

Run-state matters as much as build-state. We optimise for operability, auditability, and change control from day one, because that is where enterprise value is won or lost.

Substance over hype. We deliberately avoid delivery theatre, buzzwords, and novelty for novelty sake. Credibility is earned through execution.

Learn from experienced practitioners. You will work alongside people who have built, broken, fixed, and run enterprise systems, and who care deeply about doing the work properly.

A firm with a point of view. SentraAI is opinionated by design. We stand for doing fewer things better, and we expect our people to take pride in that standard.