Freelance Data Engineer
Mediahuis is looking for
a Senior Data Engineer to take end-to-end technical ownership of the data flowing through our Traffic Dashboard, from source to the information shown in the application.
We believe you could be the perfect fit.
Your impact.
Traffic Dashboard is a business-critical application used daily across our newsrooms. It provides real-time insight into how our journalism performs and helps editorial teams make informed decisions throughout the day. You make sure the data reaching our users is correct, complete and fresh, and that we can prove it across the full path from source to application.
You ensure that our real-time data processing remains stable, reliable and efficient under production load, while safeguarding latency, freshness, completeness and semantic correctness throughout the data flow.
You've already started daydreaming? Keep reading - this opportunity is even better than you imagined!
Your role includes.
Taking end-to-end ownership of the data flow behind Traffic Dashboard, from event ingestion and processing through storage, APIs and the final application;
Owning and evolving the always-on, event-driven data pipelines feeding Traffic Dashboard, safeguarding throughput, latency, freshness, completeness, reconciliation and reliable failure recovery;
Proactively monitoring both system health and actual data outcomes, detecting delayed, missing, duplicated or incorrect data before it impacts our users;
Designing and implementing reliable production changes with explicit assumptions, end-to-end validation, monitoring, rollback and verification of the actual final state;
Further developing and innovating new use cases with real-time and aggregated data are processed, stored and exposed to Traffic Dashboard, including the evolving balance between Databricks, NoSQL/search serving layers and application APIs;
Building and productionising SQL and lakehouse workloads in Databricks and Spark, and integrating them reliably with real-time and event-driven processing;
Working with the existing TypeScript / JavaScript / Node.js backend where required to troubleshoot and deliver solutions end to end;
Improving observability, data-quality controls, scalability and maintainability while reducing the operational complexity of the platform.
You are available to work onsite in Antwerp two days per week.
What makes you a great fit?
What is on your CV is important, but it is by no means the only thing we value. You are a senior engineer who takes independent responsibility for critical production data systems and follows data end to end rather than validating individual components in isolation. You have built and operated real-time streaming or event-driven data pipelines in production and understand throughput, latency, backpressure, replay, retries, duplicates, late events, partial failures and recovery.
You combine a strong SQL and lakehouse foundation, preferably with Databricks and Spark, with hands-on production experience using NoSQL, document or search-oriented data stores. Experience with a specific product such as Elasticsearch is useful but not a hard requirement.
You work carefully and methodically: you distinguish facts from hypotheses, validate assumptions and actual outcomes, investigate root causes and communicate uncertainty accurately. Observability, reconciliation, debugging, performance optimisation, failure handling and incident analysis are part of your engineering mindset.
Product-specific technologies such as Azure Event Hubs, Redpanda Connect/Benthos, Logstash or Elasticsearch can be learned on the job. You are comfortable enough with TypeScript, JavaScript and Node.js to understand, debug and modify an existing backend. You speak fluent Dutch and English.
What's about to become your second home?
You'll join TPS, the international technology organization of Mediahuis. Within this environment, you'll take ownership of the end-to-end data foundation behind Traffic Dashboard, a business-critical platform used across our newsrooms. You'll work at the intersection of real-time data, lakehouse engineering and application development, collaborating with colleagues to ensure our journalists and editorial teams can rely on data that is timely, complete and demonstrably correct every day.
It’s up to you now!
Will you take your chance, or keep daydreaming? If the Senior Data Engineer position sounds like the perfect fit, don’t hesitate - apply today using the button below.
Not a perfect match but eager to grow into this role? Let’s talk!