Senior Data Engineer - Contractor at Cars & Bids
$80–$120/hrfrom the description
Jul 13, 2026
—
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A part-time, independent contractor role for a sole data practitioner supporting an online vehicle auction platform's end-to-end data stack. Day-to-day work spans pipeline ingestion, Snowflake warehousing and cost management, dbt-style transformation and modeling, batch ML inference, and reverse ETL into operational tools like HubSpot and Iterable. Best suited to an experienced data engineer comfortable working autonomously across the full data lifecycle at roughly 20 hours per week.
Senior level · Remote · Contract
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 350 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database architects). range 150–630
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $142,568 (middle half $111,775–$173,013). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (11)
This is an independent contractor (1099/B2B) fractional engagement at ~20 hours/week on a monthly retainer — not a full-time or W-2 role.
The degree requirement states 'Bachelor's degree … or equivalent experience,' so no formal degree is hard-gated.
Ingestion tooling is listed as 'OpenFlow, NiFi, Fivetran, Airbyte, or equivalent' — any one of these satisfies the requirement; OpenFlow/Hevo are the current in-house tools.
Reverse ETL experience is required both bespoke (API integrations, stored procedures) and via SaaS tools; Hightouch and Census are named as examples under the required block and are captured as alternatives of each other rather than separate hard gates.
MLOps is listed as a required qualification framed around keeping training pipelines, feature tables, and batch inference healthy in production — not ML research.
Analytics engineering workflow (modeling, testing, documentation) is required but names no specific tool (e.g. dbt); dbt is the canonical tool for this workflow and is listed as preferred to reflect the absence of an explicit name in the required section.
Snowpark and Snowflake Cortex appear together under Nice-to-have, as does LLM-driven analytics workflow experience.
HubSpot and Iterable/Braze appear as named downstream targets in the responsibilities narrative, not in a formal requirements section; listed as preferred context.
SOC code 15-1243 (Database Architects) is chosen because the primary day-to-day work is designing and maintaining the data warehouse, pipelines, and data models. 15-2051 (Data Scientists) is the runner-up given the MLOps and batch inference responsibilities.
Posting is for a contract engagement — the market benchmarks below price full-time roles, so read the comp comparison with that in mind.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.