Senior / Lead Data Engineer

About Bullish

Bullish is an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. These include: Bullish Exchange – a regulated and institutionally focused digital assets spot and derivatives exchange, integrating a high-performance central limit order book matching engine with automated market making to provide deep and predictable liquidity. Bullish Exchange is regulated in Germany, Hong Kong, and Gibraltar. CoinDesk Indices – a collection of tradable proprietary and single-asset benchmarks and indices that track the performance of digital assets for global institutions in the digital assets and traditional finance industries. CoinDesk Data - a broad suite of digital assets market data and analytics, providing real-time insights into prices, trends, and market dynamics. CoinDesk Insights – a digital asset media and events provider and operator of Coindesk.com, a digital media platform that covers news and insights about digital assets, the underlying markets, policy, and blockchain technology.

Reports To

Lead Engineer, Engineering

Engineering Organization & Culture

At Bullish, we are engineering the institutional standard for the digital asset industry. Our mission is to build a platform where security and compliance are the foundational core, requiring a commitment to technical excellence that goes beyond simply delivering code. We operate as a global engineering organization, setting a high bar in a demanding environment for those driven to do the best work of their careers alongside world-class peers.

We value engineers who treat development as a craft and own the outcome from concept to deployment. You will be expected to navigate the unknown, bring structure to ambiguity, and help shape the frameworks and processes that drive our global teams forward. We refuse to compromise on quality and seek problem solvers who thrive on high-impact technical challenges.

The Team: Data Engineering

The Data Platform team powers trading insights, compliance reporting, and Business Intelligence across the organisation.

The Role

A senior individual contributor who will own and evolve our Data Platform end-to-end — designing scalable pipelines, championing modelling standards, and driving architecture and tooling decisions. You’ll partner closely with our AI/ML team to ensure high-quality, well-governed data fuels intelligent products.

What You’ll Do

• Collaborate with stakeholders to decompose ambiguous problems into tested data solutions.
• Own our medallion architecture (bronze → silver → gold), ensuring quality at every layer.
• Develop dbt models, tests, and docs serving cross-functional stakeholders.
• Drive modelling decisions — dimensional models, snapshots, SCDs — across Exchange and Market Data.
• Design and maintain production data pipelines using Apache Airflow.
• Improve pipeline observability, alerting, and SLA monitoring; champion reliability practices.
• Mentor engineers via design reviews, pairing, and documentation.
• Evaluate new tools or patterns (streaming, real-time views) where they add value.
• Collaborate with the team’s AI specialists to deliver AI-driven Data Platform capabilities.

What You Bring

• 6+ years in Data Engineering, with 2+ years in a senior or lead capacity.
• Pragmatic problem-solver — you set direction, unblock others, and make trade-offs.
• Strong communicator — can whiteboard architecture and narrate data stories alike.
• Deep expertise in SQL, Python, and modern tooling (dbt, Airflow, BigQuery or equiv.).
• Strong data modelling fundamentals — you think in schemas, grain, and lineage first.
• Production GCP experience (BigQuery, GCS, GKE, IAM) or comparable cloud platforms.
• Solid grasp of Kubernetes concepts (pods, Helm charts, resource management).

Nice to Have

• Experience in crypto, digital assets, or exchange platforms — order books, market data.
• Familiarity with streaming frameworks (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Flink) and real-time patterns.
• Exposure to Data Governance or privacy frameworks in regulated finance.
• Experience building Conversational Analytics, RAG, or MCP-based AI tools.

Bullish is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are fast evolving and striving towards being a globally-diverse community. With integrity at our core, our success is driven by a talented team of individuals and the different perspectives they are encouraged to bring to work every day.