GCP Data Engineer – Data Warehouse Migration (Contract)

Location: Denver, CO

Duration: 6-month contract

Experience: 6+ years

Work Authorization: Only U.S. Citizens and Green Card holders will be considered. Candidates must be able to work on our W2.

Position Summary

We are seeking a GCP Data Engineer to drive a large-scale data warehouse migration to Google Cloud Platform. The role involves migrating legacy on-prem data warehouse workloads to BigQuery, re-engineering ETL/ELT pipelines, validating data quality and reconciliation, and optimizing performance and cost in the target environment. You will work closely with data architects, analysts, and business stakeholders to deliver a reliable, well-governed cloud data platform.

Technical Stack

Cloud Platform: Google Cloud Platform (BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, Cloud Composer)

Migration Tooling: BigQuery Migration Service, Database Migration Service, Datastream

Languages: SQL, Python, PySpark

Orchestration: Cloud Composer (Airflow), dbt

Source Systems: Legacy EDWs (Teradata / Oracle / SQL Server / Netezza), flat files, APIs

Data Modeling: Dimensional modeling (star/snowflake), partitioning and clustering strategies in BigQuery

DevOps: Git, CI/CD (Cloud Build / GitHub Actions), Terraform

Governance & Quality: Dataplex, data lineage, reconciliation and validation frameworks, IAM and security best practices

Responsibilities

Migrate legacy data warehouse schemas, historical data, and workloads to BigQuery, including SQL translation and refactoring of stored procedures and ETL logic

Design, build, and optimize batch and streaming pipelines using Dataflow, Dataproc/PySpark, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Composer

Perform data validation and reconciliation between source and target systems to ensure completeness, accuracy, and auditability

Optimize BigQuery performance and cost through partitioning, clustering, materialized views, and workload tuning

Implement CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practices for data pipelines and GCP resources

Collaborate with architects, analysts, and business teams on cutover planning, parallel-run testing, and post-migration support

Required Experience

6+ years of data engineering experience, including 3+ years hands-on with GCP data services (BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Composer)

Proven experience with at least one end-to-end data warehouse migration to BigQuery (e.g., from Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server, or Netezza)

Expert-level SQL and strong Python/PySpark skills, including translating and optimizing complex legacy SQL for BigQuery

Solid understanding of dimensional data modeling, data quality/reconciliation frameworks, and cloud security/IAM fundamentals

Nice to have: GCP Professional Data Engineer certification, dbt, Datastream/CDC pipelines, and Looker or other BI tools