Staff Data Engineer

At Vandebron, we are developing a modern open data lakehouse and have already laid real groundwork on its strategy and architecture. We are looking for a senior engineer at Staff level, our most senior individual contributor grade, to bring additional depth and experience to that effort.

We are Vandebron

We are fully committed to making 100% green energy available, 100% of the time. Think smart solutions: flexible utilisation of wind and solar farms, smart charging for electric vehicles, and efficient energy storage.

Where you'll land

As Staff Data Engineer, you work across the whole data platform: the lakehouse, the warehouse, ingestion, orchestration, ML/AI Ops and the engineering standards everything downstream depends on. You work shoulder to shoulder with the data engineers, as their most experienced peer and mentor.

Your weight comes from depth, judgement and the trust you earn. You partner with other data engineers on technical direction, strengthen the critical paths together, and raise the bar for everyone who builds on the platform. You work alongside our data and intelligence leader as their technical peer. They lead the analytics and intelligence teams; you help steward the platform those teams build on.

What Staff means here: you take on the platform problems of the highest scope and complexity, make foundational improvements, and support the other engineers through technical direction and mentorship. It is a depth-and-influence level.

We are mid-migration to Kraken as our energy operations backbone. This role does not run that migration, but it owns how Kraken's data lands on the platform and becomes usable for customer intelligence, so the migration, from the start, shapes the work.

What you’ll do

• Shape the lakehouse architecture with the team, such as table formats, catalogues, storage layout and engine integration, and turn those decisions into clear ADRs everyone can build on.
• Architect and implement a shift-left data governance strategy, working with upstream data producers to establish data contracts, SLOs, and code-enforced quality gates that catch issues before production.
• Serve as the primary technical peer and trusted advisor to Data & Intelligence leadership, helping translate long-term business strategy into a robust data platform roadmap.
• Work with the data engineers day-to-day by sharing context, reviewing each other's work, and mentoring where your experience helps.
• Establish and scale the MLOps & AIOps capabilities of our platform, defining standard engineering patterns for feature stores, model registries, LLM/generative AI data orchestration and agent frameworks.
• Work closely with Product & Platform engineering, with a clear boundary: they drive the composable MACH backend behind our headless customer-facing products; you drive the data platform that feeds intelligence to those experiences and our customer needs.

What you bring

• 8 or more years in data engineering or data platform roles, with several years operating at senior or staff level.
• Deep, hands-on experience with a modern lakehouse stack — ideally Apache Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi) on object storage, and a strong grasp of why open table formats matter.
• Production experience with cloud warehouses, including security (RBAC, masking) and cost management.
• A track record of setting technical direction: RFCs, ADRs, design reviews, and the judgement to know when to be pragmatic.
• Experience mentoring or coaching more junior engineers. You lift the people around you, not just the codebase.
• Strong collaboration and communication: you build trust across teams and explain technical trade-offs to non-experts without dumbing them down.
• MLOps experience to take models to production responsibly, like registries, feature serving, and monitoring for drift.

What we offer

• An annual bonus based on company performance.
• 30 paid vacation days per year to recharge and get inspired.
• Two extra days off: 1 for religious/cultural celebrations and 1 volunteer day.
• The option to work from abroad for up to 6 weeks per year (maximum of 4 consecutive weeks, including up to 4 weeks outside the EU).
• An annual learning budget of €1200 and access to internal Learning & Development workshops.
• Unlimited access to the mental health platform OpenUp.
• A solid pension scheme to plan for your future.
• A net monthly allowance of €30 for internet costs and €20 for phone costs.
• A one-time net allowance of €200 to set up a comfortable home office.
• A flexible hybrid working environment, splitting time between your home and our CO2-neutral office in Amsterdam.
• Daily healthy lunches prepared by our own in-house chefs.
• An NS Business Card if you travel 10 km or more to the office.