Data Observability Engineer
Zurich, Switzerland — Hybrid
Data Infrastructure | Data Observability | Data Reliability | Data Quality | Data Engineering
Our client, a growing Data Infrastructure company based in Zurich, is looking for a Data Observability Engineer to build the systems that detect broken pipelines, data-quality degradation, lineage issues, and production failures before they affect downstream teams and products.
You'll work at the intersection of Data Engineering, Observability, and Reliability Engineering, creating visibility across the complete lifecycle of production data.
What You'll Work On
• Build observability systems for production data pipelines
• Develop automated data-quality checks and monitoring in Python and SQL
• Monitor Airflow pipelines for failures, delays, and abnormal behaviour
• Build observability across Snowflake data workloads
• Integrate quality and reliability checks into dbt workflows
• Develop telemetry and tracing using OpenTelemetry
• Detect schema changes, freshness issues, volume anomalies, and data-quality degradation
• Improve visibility into data lineage and upstream/downstream dependencies
• Define SLIs and reliability standards for critical data products
• Build alerting and automated diagnostics for production data incidents
• Perform root-cause analysis across complex data pipelines
• Partner with Data Engineers to make reliability and observability part of platform design
Core Skills
• 3+ years in Data Engineering, Data Platform Engineering, Data Reliability, or similar roles
• Python
• SQL
• Apache Airflow
• Snowflake
• dbt
• OpenTelemetry or comparable observability technologies
• Data-quality monitoring
• Strong understanding of modern production data pipelines
Nice to Have
⭐ Great Expectations / Soda
⭐ Monte Carlo / Bigeye or similar data-observability tooling
⭐ Data lineage / OpenLineage
⭐ Data contracts
⭐ Prometheus / Grafana
⭐ Kafka
⭐ Spark
⭐ AWS / GCP / Azure
⭐ Terraform
⭐ Incident management and postmortems
⭐ Experience defining SLIs / SLOs for data products