senior-data-engineer

name	senior-data-engineer
description	Use when designing data architectures, building batch or streaming pipelines, implementing data quality frameworks, optimizing ETL/ELT performance, working with Airflow/dbt/Spark/Kafka, or troubleshooting data pipeline failures. Provides pipeline generation, data quality validation, and SQL/Spark performance optimization.
license	MIT + Commons Clause
metadata	{"version":"1.1.0","author":"borghei","category":"engineering","domain":"data-engineering","updated":"2026-04-02T00:00:00.000Z","tags":["airflow","spark","data-pipelines","warehousing","etl"],"python-tools":"pipeline_orchestrator.py, data_quality_validator.py, etl_performance_optimizer.py","tech-stack":"python, sql, spark, airflow, dbt, kafka"}

Senior Data Engineer

The agent generates pipeline configurations (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster), validates data quality with profiling and anomaly detection, and optimizes SQL/Spark performance with actionable recommendations.

---

Quick Start

# Generate an Airflow DAG for incremental PostgreSQL -> Snowflake
python scripts/pipeline_orchestrator.py generate \
  --type airflow --source postgres --destination snowflake \
  --tables orders,customers --mode incremental --schedule "0 5 * * *"

# Validate data quality against a schema
python scripts/data_quality_validator.py validate data.csv \
  --schema schema.json --detect-anomalies --json

# Profile a dataset
python scripts/data_quality_validator.py profile data.csv --json

# Optimize a slow SQL query
python scripts/etl_performance_optimizer.py analyze-sql query.sql \
  --warehouse snowflake --json

# Estimate query cost
python scripts/etl_performance_optimizer.py estimate-cost query.sql \
  --warehouse bigquery --stats data_stats.json --json

Tools Overview

Tool	Subcommands	Purpose
pipeline_orchestrator.py	generate, validate, template	Generate Airflow/Prefect/Dagster pipeline code, validate DAGs
data_quality_validator.py	validate, profile, generate-suite, contract, schema	Schema validation, profiling, anomaly detection, Great Expectations
etl_performance_optimizer.py	analyze-sql, analyze-spark, optimize-partition, estimate-cost, template	SQL/Spark optimization, partition strategy, cost estimation

All subcommands support --json for machine-readable output and --output for file writing.

---

Workflow 1: Batch ETL Pipeline (PostgreSQL -> dbt -> Snowflake)

Step 1 -- Generate extraction config.

python scripts/pipeline_orchestrator.py generate \
  --type airflow --source postgres --tables orders,customers,products \
  --mode incremental --watermark updated_at --output dags/extract_source.py

Step 2 -- Create dbt staging model.

-- models/staging/stg_orders.sql
WITH source AS (
    SELECT * FROM {{ source('postgres', 'orders') }}
)
SELECT order_id, customer_id, order_date, total_amount, status, _extracted_at
FROM source
WHERE order_date >= DATEADD(day, -3, CURRENT_DATE)

Step 3 -- Create incremental mart model.

-- models/marts/fct_orders.sql
{{ config(materialized='incremental', unique_key='order_id', cluster_by=['order_date']) }}

SELECT o.order_id, o.customer_id, c.customer_segment, o.order_date, o.total_amount, o.status
FROM {{ ref('stg_orders') }} o
LEFT JOIN {{ ref('dim_customers') }} c ON o.customer_id = c.customer_id
{% if is_incremental() %}
WHERE o._extracted_at > (SELECT MAX(_extracted_at) FROM {{ this }})
{% endif %}

Step 4 -- Wire into Airflow DAG.

with DAG('daily_etl', schedule_interval='0 5 * * *', catchup=False, tags=['etl']) as dag:
    extract = BashOperator(task_id='extract', bash_command='python scripts/extract.py --date {{ ds }}')
    transform = BashOperator(task_id='dbt_run', bash_command='dbt run --select marts.*')
    test = BashOperator(task_id='dbt_test', bash_command='dbt test --select marts.*')
    extract >> transform >> test

Step 5 -- Validate.

python scripts/data_quality_validator.py validate --table fct_orders --checks all --output report.json

Validation checkpoint: DAG runs end-to-end. Data quality report shows 0 failures on uniqueness, completeness, and freshness.

---

Workflow 2: Real-Time Streaming (Kafka -> Spark -> Delta Lake)

Step 1 -- Define event schema and Kafka topic.

kafka-topics.sh --create --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 \
  --topic user-events --partitions 12 --replication-factor 3 \
  --config retention.ms=604800000

Step 2 -- Implement Spark Structured Streaming.

events_df = spark.readStream.format("kafka") \
    .option("kafka.bootstrap.servers", "localhost:9092") \
    .option("subscribe", "user-events") \
    .option("startingOffsets", "latest").load()

parsed_df = events_df.select(from_json(col("value").cast("string"), schema).alias("data")).select("data.*")

aggregated_df = parsed_df \
    .withWatermark("event_timestamp", "10 minutes") \
    .groupBy(window(col("event_timestamp"), "5 minutes"), col("event_type")) \
    .agg(count("*").alias("event_count"), approx_count_distinct("user_id").alias("unique_users"))

aggregated_df.writeStream.format("delta").outputMode("append") \
    .option("checkpointLocation", "/checkpoints/user-events") \
    .trigger(processingTime="1 minute").start()

Step 3 -- Handle errors with dead letter queue.

def process_with_dlq(batch_df, batch_id):
    valid_df = batch_df.filter(col("event_id").isNotNull())
    invalid_df = batch_df.filter(col("event_id").isNull())
    valid_df.write.format("delta").mode("append").save("/data/lake/user_events")
    if invalid_df.count() > 0:
        invalid_df.withColumn("error_reason", lit("missing_event_id")) \
            .write.format("delta").mode("append").save("/data/lake/dlq/user_events")

Validation checkpoint: Consumer lag stays under threshold. DLQ table has < 0.1% of total events.

---

Workflow 3: Data Quality Framework

Step 1 -- Generate a Great Expectations suite from data.

python scripts/data_quality_validator.py generate-suite data.csv --output expectations.json

Step 2 -- Validate against a data contract.

# contracts/orders_contract.yaml
contract:
  name: orders_data_contract
  version: "1.0.0"
schema:
  properties:
    order_id: { type: string, format: uuid }
    total_amount: { type: decimal, minimum: 0 }
    status: { type: string, enum: [pending, confirmed, shipped, delivered, cancelled] }
sla:
  freshness: { max_delay_hours: 1 }
  completeness: { min_percentage: 99.9 }
  accuracy: { duplicate_tolerance: 0.01 }

python scripts/data_quality_validator.py contract data.csv --contract orders_contract.yaml --json

Step 3 -- Add dbt tests for ongoing validation.

models:
  - name: fct_orders
    columns:
      - name: order_id
        tests: [unique, not_null]
      - name: total_amount
        tests:
          - not_null
          - dbt_utils.accepted_range: { min_value: 0, max_value: 1000000 }

Validation checkpoint: Quality score >= 95%. Zero duplicates. Freshness under SLA threshold.

---

Architecture Decision Framework

Question	Batch	Streaming
Latency requirement	Hours to days	Seconds to minutes
Processing complexity	Complex transforms, ML	Simple aggregations
Cost sensitivity	More cost-effective	Higher infra cost
Error handling	Easy reprocessing	Requires careful DLQ design

Decision tree:

Real-time insight needed?
  Yes -> Exactly-once needed?
    Yes -> Kafka + Flink/Spark Structured Streaming
    No  -> Kafka + consumer groups
  No  -> Daily volume > 1TB?
    Yes -> Spark/Databricks
    No  -> dbt + warehouse compute

Feature	Warehouse (Snowflake/BigQuery)	Lakehouse (Delta/Iceberg)
Best for	BI, SQL analytics	ML, unstructured data
Storage cost	Higher (proprietary)	Lower (open formats)
Flexibility	Schema-on-write	Schema-on-read

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Anti-Patterns

1. Full table reload on every run -- use incremental loads with watermark columns.
2. No dead letter queue -- failed records silently dropped. Always route failures to a DLQ.
3. Timezone mismatch -- normalize all timestamps to UTC at extraction.
4. Missing freshness checks -- add dbt source freshness before transforms start.
5. Skipping schema drift detection -- use mergeSchema option or data contracts to catch new columns.

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Troubleshooting

Problem	Cause	Solution
Pipeline silently produces zero rows	Timezone mismatch on watermark column	Normalize to UTC; add row-count assertion
Spark shuffle 10x slower than expected	Data skew on join key	Salt the key or broadcast the smaller table
Airflow shows "no tasks to run"	Circular dependency or import error	airflow dags list-import-errors; fix import
dbt succeeds but dashboards stale	Source freshness not checked	Add dbt source freshness as prerequisite task
Kafka consumer lag grows unbounded	Throughput < producer rate	Increase partitions, scale consumers, batch max.poll.records
Quality validator false-positive anomalies	Z-score threshold too tight	Raise threshold or switch to IQR mode

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References

Guide	Path
Pipeline Architecture	references/data_pipeline_architecture.md
Data Modeling Patterns	references/data_modeling_patterns.md
DataOps Best Practices	references/dataops_best_practices.md

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Integration Points

Skill	Integration
senior-data-scientist	Feature engineering consumes curated mart data
senior-ml-engineer	ML pipelines depend on feature store tables
senior-devops	CI/CD for dbt, Airflow deployment, container orchestration
senior-architect	Architecture reviews for lakehouse vs warehouse decisions
code-reviewer	Pipeline code reviews for DAGs, dbt models, Spark jobs

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Last Updated: April 2026 Version: 1.1.0