Software Engineer - Data Engineering

About Catawiki

At Catawiki, every day brings the extraordinary! Whether it’s Daniel Ricciardo’s Formula 1 Car, a Woolly Mammoth’s Skeleton, Lady Gaga's Jumpsuit or Usain Bolt’s running shoe, we encounter exceptional objects every day.

We’re a one-of-a-kind marketplace for buying and selling special objects. Each week, more than 110,000 unique items are auctioned, all carefully curated by our passionate in-house experts. Having sold over 25 million unique objects, our mission is to become the world’s most popular destination for special objects. As a growing, diverse and sustainable scale-up, we proudly live by three core values. If these values resonate with you, we’d love to explore how you can join us:

• Taking ownership and driving impact
• Being open to change and feedback
• Being passionate about our mission and our customers.

About The Role And Team

At Catawiki, data sits at the core of our decision-making, powering everything from commercial strategy and analytics to machine learning, AI, and performance marketing. The Software Engineer - Data Engineering role exists to ensure this data foundation is robust, scalable, and ready to support a fast-growing global marketplace.

You’ll join a highly collaborative engineering environment, working closely with Machine Learning Engineers, Platform Engineers, and Backend Engineers. The team is responsible for building and evolving the data ecosystem that enables teams across Catawiki to explore, experiment, and innovate with confidence. The scope of the role is intentionally broad, sitting at the intersection of data engineering, data platform engineering, and machine learning enablement. As Catawiki continues to grow, we’re expanding our data engineering capabilities to help scale the business, support more advanced use cases, and keep data a true competitive advantage.

What You’ll Do as a Software Engineer - Data Engineering

• Build and Scale Data Pipelines: Maintain and develop reliable batch and streaming pipelines that ingest data from internal systems and third-party sources into Catawiki’s data warehouse.
• Empower Data Science and AI: Maintain and enhance the tools and platforms used by Data Scientists for analysis, experimentation, model training, and model deployment.
• Protect Data and Privacy: Ensure data is stored securely and that governance, access control, and privacy standards are consistently applied across the data platform.
• Run and Evolve the Data Platform: Maintain the infrastructure that hosts our data tools and applications, keeping it scalable, stable, and cost-effective.
• Own Core Data Tooling: Self-host and operate key data engineering tools such as Airflow and Airbyte on Kubernetes.
• Keep the Lights On: Provide operational support to ensure pipelines, platforms, and tools run smoothly and reliably for teams across the business.

Who You Are

• Experienced Data Engineer: You have 3+ years of hands-on experience building and operating data systems in production.
• Strong in Python, SQL & Data Integration: You’re fluent in Python and SQL and have experience with data integration tools such as Fivetran and/or Airbyte.
• Infrastructure & DataOps Minded: You have experience with CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform), and modern DataOps practices.
• Cloud & Platform Savvy: You’ve worked with cloud platforms (GCP is a plus) and are familiar with parts of our data stack such as BigQuery, PubSub, DataFlow, GKE, Airflow, Airbyte, FastAPI and Prometheus.
• Comfortable with Streaming & Scale: You have experience with streaming pipelines using technologies like Kafka, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, or Apache Beam.
• Curious, Collaborative & Privacy-Aware: You’re keen to learn new tools, support data platform and machine learning engineering initiatives, and understand the importance of data privacy and GDPR.

Where You’ll Be

The role is based in Portugal (Lisbon) with a hybrid arrangement (At least 2 days in the office per week).

Why You'll Love Working with Us

• Create a visible impact by working at scale in a global organisation serving millions of customers across 80+ categories. In our flat structure, every role has a broad scope and directly impacts both our customers and the business.
• Learn and grow through our Learning & Development initiatives, including clear development plans and mentorship programmes to support your career progression.
• A culture of connection defines us. We’re a passionate, diverse team of 800+ Catawikians representing 60+ nationalities. We foster an inclusive and queer-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to bring their full self to work.
• Celebrate life’s moments with us. You’ll receive a €100 Catavoucher when you join, a €50 Catavoucher on your birthday, and an extra day off each year to “Pursue Your Passion”. We also offer additional leave for key work anniversaries and important life events. Benefits may vary by location.

Our Offices and Way of Working

Our vibrant offices in Amsterdam, Paris and Lisbon are designed to inspire collaboration. Most Catawikians operate in a hybrid setup, combining office-based and remote work, with a minimum of two days per week in the office, unless a role is explicitly stated as fully remote or fully office-based.

Key skills/competency

• Data Engineering
• Python
• SQL
• Data Pipelines
• GCP
• Airflow
• BigQuery
• Streaming Technologies
• DataOps
• Kubernetes