Data engineer

About Smallpdf

Smallpdf and PDFtools are industry leaders in digital document solutions, helping millions worldwide streamline their workflow with powerful, easy-to-use tools. We are on a mission to simplify document management and enhance productivity.

As a team of over >110 people from 34 nationalities in our offices in Zurich, Belgrade, and Barcelona, we’re proud to have made PDFs and life a little bit easier for over a billion customers across our web, mobile, and desktop applications. Our reputation for Swiss engineering standards has made us a trusted choice for industry leaders like Lufthansa, UBS, Swiss Life, and millions of people worldwide.

Your mission - should you choose to accept it

We are seeking an experienced and talented Data Engineer to own and enhance our Data Platform. Our team processes close to 100m records daily. With our 50TB+ DWH we support our data-driven colleagues on everything from company reporting, through document analytics, to AB testing.

This role will focus on building and maintaining robust data pipelines, ensuring a high-performance data warehouse (Redshift), and strengthening our dbt transformation layer.

You will collaborate with experienced Data Platform Engineers, data-driven Product Managers, and Data Scientists to extract data and convert it into actionable results.

The ideal candidate is highly proficient in Python and SQL, and comfortable working within an AWS-based infrastructure.

What you will be working on

• Ingesting and processing TBs of near-real time events from our frontend and backend systems, which form the backbone of our reporting, AB testing, and operational monitoring.

• Collaborating with Backend and Security engineers on extracting data from backend systems and understanding usage patterns.

• Automating our worldwide Google Ads campaigns by optimising keyword selection and bidding targets using historical data.

• Extracting data from asynchronous third-party APIs to improve our understanding of SEO and search.

• Create tools for dbt users to easily verify their transformation, either locally or in CI, and help with refreshing downstream or long-running models.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, optimise and troubleshoot our Redshift data warehouse to ensure high performance and reliability.

• Enhance and extend the dbt layer - optimise dbt models, tests, improve our CI/CD, documentation, keep dbt up to date and help others use dbt in an efficient way.

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable data pipelines integrating multiple 3rd party sources through Airbyte and Airflow.

• Ensure timely data delivery, monitor our daily processing, proactively troubleshoot issues and support the Analytics team’s needs.

• Occasionally contribute to data analysis and visualisation using Looker and Metabase, helping our end users to translate data into actionable insights.

We use the latest technologies, including:

• WS, Redshift, dbt, Airflow, Airbyte, Jenkins, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, Python, SQL, and data visualization tools like Looker and Metabase.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in SQL and dbt - we have a lot of data and processing that needs to be maintained and optimised, with dbt being at the centre.

• Good knowledge of operating and optimising a modern Data Warehouse is crucial.

• Because some of our data manipulation is in Python, a good knowledge of Python beyond simple scripting is needed.

• Familiarity with AWS infrastructure, Terraform and Kubernetes, or similar technologies.

• As an engineering-first company, we value full ownership, from data ingestion to visualisation and communicating clearly to people with different roles within the company.

Nice to have:

• Knowing Redshift would be a big plus.

• Experience with real-time frameworks (AWS Firehose, Kafka) would be beneficial.

• Experience with Airbyte, Airflow, Jenkins and Docker or similar technologies.

• Previous experience in a SaaS or product-led growth company.

Our benefits

🌍 You get to impact how over 30 million people get work done monthly.

🚀 Push boundaries and dare to fail—that’s how we learn!

🏝️ 30 vacation days—yep, you read that right— you can take them whenever you need them.

🕘 Flexibility: we have flexible working hours

🧳 Need a long break? We offer sabbatical leave to employees who’ve been with us for over two years.

👶 16 weeks parental leave—100% of your salary—for all new parents.

🐶 Don’t leave your four-legged friends at home; our offices are pet-friendly.

📚 A well-being budget of up to 2,000 CHF every year that can be used for training and development (plus days off for courses or training) and for physical and mental well-being purposes.

🥧 Possibility of a Phantom stock option plan (PSOP). (Conditions apply.)

👩‍💻 Hack days to challenge you and your team, plus build amazing things

Smallpdf is an equal-opportunity employer. We believe our greatest strength is a talented, diverse and inclusive workforce. We strongly oppose any form of hiring or workplace discrimination against candidates or employees on any basis including race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, philosophy, nationality, disability or genetic information. We’re committed to fostering a safe, supportive environment where everyone can work as their full selves and reach their greatest potential. That’s why we encourage applications from people with diverse backgrounds and experiences to join this multicultural team.

Submitting your application allows Smallpdf to handle and store your data.

Smallpdf does not seek or accept unsolicited applications or CVs from recruitment agencies. We are not responsible for and will not pay any fees, commissions, or any other payment related to unsolicited applications or CVs except as required in a written contract between Smallpdf and the recruitment agency or party requesting payment of a fee.