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Ground News is a news comparison platform that helps readers break free from algorithmic filter bubbles and understand media bias. Unlike traditional news companies, Ground is politically neutral and supported by reader subscriptions rather than ad-driven algorithms.
As a Senior Data Engineer, you will build the analytical foundation that powers Ground News. You'll work within the ML chapter and Platform & Infrastructure pod, splitting time between developing data integrations into the warehouse and creating analytical layers that serve KPIs across Growth & Monetization, Core Experience, and Content Intelligence teams.
This is a hands-on senior role focused on designing reusable, scalable data models that enable analysts to self-serve without bottlenecks. You'll own the complete lifecycle of data reliability: ingestion, quality, accuracy, coverage, and failure response. When metrics look wrong, you'll trace them from source events through to dashboards. You'll be a key bridge between stakeholders asking questions and the systems that answer them, translating business needs into trustworthy, reusable data.
Key responsibilities include: designing and building scalable conformed data models and analytical layers for experimentation and company KPIs; owning data connectors from replicated backend tables to custom integrations and third-party sources; managing infrastructure as code and deployment workflows on AWS and GCP using Kubernetes and OpenTofu; monitoring pipeline freshness and responding to failures; making senior architectural decisions on table types, datastores, and schema design; partnering with analysts, ML engineers, and product teams to enable self-service analytics; and championing engineering quality through testing, code reviews, observability, and operational excellence.
Ground News was co-founded by a former NASA engineer and Bain consultant. The company is based in Kitchener, Ontario, but this role is fully remote. The culture emphasizes collaboration, creativity, and diverse perspectives, with a mission to build a world where civil debate, media accountability, and critical thinking are the norm.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of experience building and operating production data platforms and analytical models
- Deep expertise in SQL and Python
- Broad experience with dimensional modeling: grain, table types, conformed dimensions, and load patterns
- Hands-on experience with modern data tooling: BigQuery, dbt, Dagster, and ingestion tools (Fivetran, Airbyte, or Google Datastream)
- Experience with data stores and event-driven systems: PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and message queues/streams (Kafka, SQS, or Pub/Sub)
- SRE-oriented experience: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance optimization for data integrations
- Experience shipping data and metrics safely with validation practices to prevent incorrect numbers from reaching dashboards and awareness of compute costs
