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Are you excited about building the data and evaluation foundations for customer‑facing AI at scale?

Upper Echelon is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to build provide data modelling with dbt on a Snowflake instance to keep AI agents accurate, safe, and genuinely helpful for the customers of a large enterprise company. 

You can be based anywhere in New Zealand, or the East Coast of Australia.

The team is great to work with, they are building excellent products and are looking for senior people that can operate independently for large portions of the working day, but are able to collaborate effectively when problems arise to solve them. 

In this role, you’ll:

• Build automated evaluation pipelines in Snowflake Cortex / Snowflake Intelligence to score responses from AI agents.
• Design and maintain Snowflake schemas and dbt models for AI telemetry, golden test suites, and customer intelligence.
• Power dashboards that give clear, comparable metrics for AI performance, latency, and cost across platforms.
• Work closely with Customer AI, Data, and Content teams to create trustworthy evaluation frameworks and feedback loops.

This is a broad brush but we are looking for people with a good track record of the following experiences

• Strong hands-on experience with dbt and Snowflake
• Able to build source ingestion pipelines into Snowflake / XADE
• Able to build a clean curation layer on top of landed source data
• Strong understanding of CDC / incremental loading patterns
• Strong data modelling capability in dbt
• Strong data testing capability across ingestion and transformation layers
• Build with data governance, access control, and security first in mind
• Able to define frameworks, conventions, and engineering standards
• Comfortable working in an environment with sensitive data and restricted access requirements
• Able to document models, pipeline behaviour, and operating standards clearly
• Experience with writing skills for agentic development is desirable
• Hands-on experience working with transactional data modelling (understands various nuances of transactional data)

The contract is 6 months to start and highly likely to extend. 

Negotiable hourly rate. Competitive.