Job: Data Platform Engineer (d/w/m)

OpenSanctions helps to keep people and companies accountable for their political and economic actions. We build a database that tracks a wide range of entities in the public interest: sanctioned companies, politicians, fraudsters and criminals. Originally built to support anti-corruption journalists, OpenSanctions has also become a powerful tool used for customer screening, legal compliance and in-depth investigative analysis.

We take pride in providing a high quality dataset to the public and to our subscribers. Based on an open source data pipeline and providing public search for everybody, we bring transparency and a commitment to accessibility and openness to the industry.

What’s the role?

We’re hiring a mid-career or senior engineer who will assume co-ownership of our data infrastructure. Our value proposition is to serve reliable, high-quality data, so you should share that passion and a pride for making an excellent technology product.

You will be working with our existing data team to add and review new data crawlers, add quality checks and new validation methods to our data pipeline, and ensure that the underlying infrastructure is running smoothly.

You will also occasionally cooperate with our support lead in helping customers with their understanding and adoption of the dataset, and improve code samples and documentation based on customer feedback.

In this role you will:

• Build and maintain a data pipeline that consolidates information from public sources into a high-quality dataset.
  • Improve our techniques for record linkage, tracking changes and data lineage, geocoding of locations, etc.
  • Think up and implement advanced data quality assurance mechanisms.
  • Build additional crawlers for relevant data sources.
• Work with our crawler engineers to review their code and make sure it’s reliable and correct.
• Work with customers to help them adopt our product for their use cases and answer technical questions about the product.
• Help to improve and automate the end-to-end technical implementation of our business (from data crawlers to our SaaS API and customer onboarding).
• Write and maintain documentation for our products.
• Work with open source contributors to our core technologies, and contribute to the open source projects we use.

Our stack:

We don’t expect you to be an expert at all/any of this. It would be good if you have some experience doing Python-based data wrangling.

• Data tools: Python 3 (w/ types), SQLAlchemy, FastAPI
• Storage: PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, JSON in buckets
• Web frontend: TypeScript, NextJS
• Operations: Github Actions, Terraform (GCP), Kubernetes
• Humans: Communicate in English (required), German (very optional)

Nice-to-have:

• Ability to understand one or more non-latin alphabets (e.g.: Cyrillic, Arabic, Farsi, Burmese)
• Experience in technical writing and working with tech-savy customers.
• Experience in fintech/regtech/compliance space.

The deal:

• We’re building a small business, not a grind-you-to-the-bones startup.
• We’re developing a really cool product that is getting adopted rapidly. Our company is unbureaucratic, and working hours can be flexible.
• Home office, remote work, or co-working location in Berlin. We will consider applications from within +/- 3 time zones from CET.
• Employment under German law for residents, or freelance contract if outside Germany.
• Salary floor of 70.000 EUR/pa

Contact: jobs@opensanctions.org