Data Engineer

Location Note:

• This a hybrid role for our Wakefield, MA office (In-office one day per week, plus additional in-person trainings and workshops as needed) The Purpose of Your Role: The Data Engineer is part of the development team responsible for building, maintaining, enhancing, and integrating Sentinel’s data pipelines, data platforms, and connected systems.
• This role owns the design and delivery of secure, scalable, reliable, and well-documented data solutions that support Sentinel’s applications, reporting, analytics, and business decisions.

A Data Engineer works across the full data engineering lifecycle:

• understanding business and technical requirements, defining architecture, documenting technical specifications, designing data models, developing and reviewing code, validating data quality, troubleshooting production issues, and supporting releases.
• This role provides technical leadership, makes sound engineering decisions, improves our standards and processes, and mentors other engineers while remaining hands-on in the work.

What you'll bring to Sentinel:

• A strong commitment to building secure, maintainable, testable, observable, and cost-effective data systems.
• Demonstrated expertise designing and operating production-grade data pipelines and data platforms.
• Advanced SQL skills and strong programming experience with Python or another language used for data engineering.
• Deep understanding of data modeling, data warehousing, data lakes, ETL/ELT, and workflow orchestration.
• Experience designing cloud-based solutions, preferably using AWS and its data services.
• Strong judgment when balancing scalability, reliability, performance, security, delivery speed, and cost.
• A quality and reliability mindset, including ownership of data accuracy, lineage, monitoring, and operational readiness.
• The ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and build consensus across teams.
• A mentoring mindset and willingness to improve engineering practices across Sentinel.
• Curiosity about how AI can responsibly improve engineering productivity, data quality, testing, and operational support while protecting sensitive information.

What you'll be responsible for:

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of end-to-end data pipelines, integrations, data models, and platform capabilities.
• Own production data systems and contribute to their availability, monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Develop and own a long term vision for our data landscape.
• Translate business and technical requirements into clear architecture, implementation plans, and incremental deliverables.
• Design and implement scalable ETL/ELT workflows that ingest, transform, validate, and deliver data from APIs, databases, files, and other systems.
• Define and improve standards for data quality, testing, documentation, lineage, observability, security, governance, and access control.
• Review architecture, technical designs, pull requests, and operational changes to identify risks and improve maintainability and performance.
• Lead the modernization of legacy data processes and help move them toward secure, automated, cloud-based solutions that follow our CI.
• Diagnose complex data, pipeline, performance, and reliability issues and drive both immediate mitigation and durable prevention.
• Optimize queries, storage, processing, and infrastructure for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with Business Analysts, Data Analysts, Software Engineers, Product Owners, Security, Infrastructure, and other stakeholders to deliver trusted data solutions.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through pairing, code reviews, technical guidance, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and make recommendations that support Sentinel’s long-term data and engineering strategy.

About you:

• We are looking for smart and innovative thinkers to drive our business and clients forward—someone with self-motivation, drive, determination, and the strength of character to challenge the status quo.
• We strive to surround ourselves with team members who are proud of their work and look for people who are willing to embrace change.
• You are a hands-on technical leader who can move comfortably between architecture, implementation, operations, and stakeholder conversations.
• You are comfortable working through ambiguity, making trade-offs explicit, and taking ownership of outcomes from concept through production.
• You raise the quality of the systems and the people around you through thoughtful reviews, clear communication, practical standards, and a willingness to share what you have learned.

What you need to have:

• Preferred qualifications: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a related field—or equivalent experience. 4+ years of professional experience in data engineering, data platform engineering, software engineering, or a related role.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, deploying, and supporting production data pipelines.
• Advanced SQL skills, including complex joins, transformations, performance tuning, and data validation.
• Strong programming experience with Python or another language used for data processing and automation.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, relational databases, analytical warehouses, data lakes, and dimensional modeling.
• Experience with AWS or another major cloud platform, including cloud storage, compute, networking, monitoring, and access-control concepts.
• Experience implementing data quality checks, automated testing, observability, logging, alerting, and operational runbooks.
• Experience with Git, pull requests, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and modern software development practices.

Experience working with sensitive, confidential, regulated, or financial data and applying appropriate security controls.

• Ability to work in a hybrid work environment, with one day in the office.
• Authorized to work in the US without current or future sponsorship.

Salary Range:

• $106,000-$113,000 At Sentinel, compensation is calibrated to your geographic location to reflect local market conditions; the posted salary range may vary based on where you live.

Nice to haves:

• Experience with Snowflake or another modern data platform.
• Experience with streaming or event-driven systems.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar technologies.
• Experience leading data-platform migrations or replacing legacy ETL processes.
• Experience with data contracts, metadata management, data catalogs, and lineage platforms.
• Experience supporting machine-learning, AI, semantic-layer, or feature-engineering use cases.
• Cloud or data-engineering certifications.
• Experience participating in technical interviews and contributing to hiring decisions.

What you’ll be part of:

• Joining our company means becoming part of something special.
• We're driven by a mission to excel in our industry and within our team, supported by people who truly care about our organization.
• Sentinel was recently recognized by The Boston Globe as a Top Place to Work in 2020 and 2023.
• In 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, Sentinel earned a Top Workplace USA Award from Energage.
• At Sentinel, we welcome people from diverse experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives – and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

So even if you don’t meet every single requirement, please consider applying if you like what you see.

• Our priority is to find talented individuals who enrich our team culture, contribute with enthusiasm, and are passionate about what they do.
• Sentinel is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes everyone to our team.
• If you need reasonable adjustments at any point in the application or interview process, please let us know.

Some of our Benefits:

• PTO (vacation, sick, personal time bank) FTO (Flexible time off for vacation, sick and personal time) after 2 years of service 12 Paid Holidays (10 stated and 2 floating holidays) 2 Community Volunteer Days 5 Summer Half Days Medical, Dental, Vision Life Insurance LTD & STD Retirement Plan with 4% Employer Match Parental Leave See What We Stand For: https://www.sentinelgroup.com/About-Us/Join-Our-Team Who we are: Sentinel Group proudly serves nearly 5,000 clients throughout the U.S.
• For 35+ years, we’ve remained devoted to positively impacting the lives of our people, our clients and our communities.

With a 9-year average associate tenure among our 265 professionals, our team’s commitment to excellent service has positioned Sentinel as the only provider who makes benefits EASY:

• easy for your people; easy for your business; and easy for you.
• Our ultimate goal is to help companies and their employees prepare for their future health, wealth and retirement needs.
• Whether it’s through retirement plans, group health insurance, reimbursement accounts or financial planning, we engineer simple solutions and continuously strive to make them better.
• Our in-house experts – and their commitment to excellence – define who we are.
• Sentinel is also one of the largest employee benefits firms in Massachusetts (Boston Business Journal) and was named a 2022 Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year in the Mentorship category (PLANADVISER Magazine). Powered by JazzHR