Cars And Bids

Senior Data Engineer - Contractor

Remote (United States) · Senior · Part-time

Sponsorship not specified$80k-$120kDetected 7 days ago

SQLSnowflakeMachine LearningData EngineeringLLMsMLOpsHubSpotCRMCommunication

About the role

Senior Data Engineer - Fractional / Contract (Retainer) Cars & Bids is where automotive enthusiasts find, engage with, and sell great cars.
Since launching in 2020, we've hosted over 34K auctions and sold more than $740 million in vehicles.
The engagement Structure: Independent contractor (1099/B2B) on a monthly retainer.

Experience owning data ingestion in production (OpenFlow, NiFi, Fivetran, Airbyte, or equivalent flow-based or managed ingestion tools).
Comfort with the full analytics engineering workflow: modeling, testing, documentation, and exposing trustworthy datasets to downstream consumers.
Working knowledge of MLOps fundamentals: keeping training pipelines running, feature tables fresh, and batch inference flowing reliably.
Proficiency in SQL and Python.
Proven experience as the only data person on a team, or clear evidence you'd thrive without a peer in your domain.
Detail-oriented with excellent analytical and communication skills, including the ability to explain data tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
Full professional proficiency in English.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related quantitative field, or equivalent experience.

Experience with Snowpark, Cortex, or similar in-warehouse ML capabilities.
Experience supporting AI-driven analytics workflows (business users querying data via LLMs) and the modeling discipline that makes those workflows reliable.
Experience in marketplace, e-commerce, or auction businesses.
Compensation This is a fractional, contract engagement compensated at $80-$120 per hour, retained monthly at roughly 20 hours per week, depending on experience.

Turn business questions into trustworthy data products that downstream users - both humans and AI - can rely on without second-guessing.
Navigate ambiguity and make two-way-door decisions quickly using data.
Make pragmatic build-vs-buy calls and resist tool sprawl.
Strategically take on good tech-debt and pay it down when business-justified.
Investigate data quality issues and remediate them at the root.
modeling, testing, documentation, and exposing trustworthy datasets to downstream consumers.

You invoice us monthly; you are responsible for your own taxes, equipment, and benefits.
This is not a W-2 or employee role, and it does not include company benefits or equity.
We care about outcomes and the running health of the data stack, not hours logged or tickets closed.

We're the fastest-growing online auction platform for enthusiast vehicles from every era, paired with a scaled media business across YouTube, the #1 automotive podcast (THIS Car Pod!), social, and events that reach over 50 million enthusiasts each month.
We are looking for an experienced data engineer to support our entire data stack - from ingestion through warehousing, transformation, modeling, and reverse ETL - as our sole dedicated data practitioner, on a part-time retainer basis.

This listing is sourced directly from Cars And Bids's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.