Lead Data Engineer

🧡 About Alma

At Alma, we believe sustainable commerce depends on fair, well-balanced trade. Because finance plays a pivotal role in business, our mission is to put it back in its rightful place - serving merchants and consumers.

Our installment and deferred payment solutions help merchants boost sales by 20% or more, increase customer loyalty, and deliver a seamless shopping experience - without encouraging bad debt.

As the buy now pay later leader in France and active in 10 European countries, we've empowered over +25,000 merchants and 10 million consumers.

With 380+ Almakers and €100M+ ARR, Alma is scaling rapidly across Europe as a member of the Next40, and we're just getting started!

 

👐 About the team

You will join the Data Engineering team, which is moving closer to the Platform organization to strengthen collaboration with SRE and Software Engineering and improve SLA standards on the data platform. 

You will report to Jonathan, Engineering Manager of the SRE team, and work within a broader data community of 3 Central Data Analysts, 2 Product Data Analysts, 6 Business Analysts, and a 5-person AI team.

This position is a permanent contract (CDI) based in Paris.

 

💼 About the job

Own and scale the data platform

• Build, maintain, and improve our data warehouse, transformation layer, and platform architecture (including the critical link between PostgreSQL and our GCP data lake) to make our stack faster, more reliable, and more resilient.

Raise engineering standards across the data stack

• Drive CI/CD practices, staging environments, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), access management, and release management — bringing a platform engineering mindset to data.

Ensure observability and platform reliability

• Lead incident management, data quality monitoring, lineage, and documentation efforts to ensure the platform remains trustworthy and easy to operate for analysts, product teams, and AI practitioners.

Shape technical decisions and enable the team

• Take ownership of complex architectural decisions (including tooling audits, e.g. Datastream),
• Contribute to AI data use cases (BigQuery integrations with tools like Dust, Claude Code, and Nao),
• Mentor other data practitioners on engineering best practices,
• Share knowledge, document decisions, and contribute to raising engineering standards across the team.

 

🧰 You will work with

GCP, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Cloud SQL, Terraform, Kubernetes, Argo Workflow, Airflow, AirByte, dbt, Python, GitHub, CI/CD, Looker, Metabase

 

🧩 About you

To succeed in this job

• 6+ years of experience as a Data Engineer, ideally in a fast-growing tech environment, with hands-on experience building and maintaining modern data platforms and orchestration workflows
• Strong command of cloud infrastructure, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), Kubernetes, and Python — you're comfortable owning both the data and the platform layer
• Analytical mindset with a strong capacity to challenge the status quo — you don't just build, you question whether we're building the right thing
• Fluency in French and English

 

And it will be nice if you also

• Have specific experience with GCP and BigQuery at scale
• Have worked with dbt for data transformation
• Have experience operating in or alongside an SRE or Platform Engineering culture

 

Don't meet every single requirement? At Alma, we believe great hires come from diverse paths. If this role excites you, we encourage you to apply. We value potential, curiosity and the ability to grow as much as experience.

 

🧘 What's in it for you

If you join, you will be able to grow and impact on:

• A pivotal moment for data at Alma — you'll join as the team transitions toward Platform, with a mandate to audit and reshape the stack, not just maintain it.
• End-to-end ownership — from architectural decisions on the PostgreSQL-to-GCP pipeline to enabling AI use cases with BigQuery, this is a high-autonomy, high-visibility role.
• Cross-functional leverage — your work will directly improve the productivity of a 20+ person data community and fuel better decisions across the entire company.

 

🤑 Compensation & benefits

• Competitive salary based on 12 months
• Profit-sharing and employee savings plan
• Health insurance: 100% covered by Alma including family package
• Disability insurance: 100% covered by Alma
• Sport: partnerships with Gymlib and Classpass, or €30/month reimbursement for your sports activities
• Maternity/paternity leave: salary maintained at 100% during leave with no seniority requirement. Return to work at 4/5 schedule paid at 100% for 8 weeks.
• Sustainable Mobility Package (FMD): €544.80/year (excluding full-remote contracts)
• Meal vouchers: €10/day, 50% covered by Alma
• Mental health: free access to MindDay platform
• Paid time off: 25 days/year (+ additional paid leave granted for employees on executive contracts)
• Access to our Learning & Development Platform
• 2 weeks of full remote possible per year in summer

 

🎯 Interview Process

• Video call with a Talent Acquisition team member to understand your path, motivation & present you the role.
• Video call with your future manager to deep dive the role, the team, your profile and answer all your questions.
• Take-home assignment followed by a case study presentation with team members to assess your practical knowledge.
• Coffee chat with future cross-functional collaborators to assess team fit.

 

🌍 Diversity & Inclusion

At Alma, we believe that diversity fuels innovation and makes our community stronger. We are committed to building a workplace where every person feels seen, respected, and empowered to do their best work whatever their gender, background, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, disability or lived experience. As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome applicants from all walks of life, and all employment decisions are made based on qualifications, merit, and business needs.