Senior Data Engineer

At ZeroNorth, we are at the forefront of transforming the shipping industry through digital innovation. Our solutions go beyond optimising business operations, they are designed to lead the industry in sustainability by significantly reducing CO2 emissions.

Our core mission of making global trade greener drives everything we do. Your contributions will play a crucial role in reducing emissions, aligning commercial success with sustainability, and delivering benefits for both profitability and the environment.

ZeroNorth is powered by a diverse team of 550+ professionals with more than 38 nationalities, operating out of global hubs including Copenhagen (our headquarters), Athens, Chennai, Mumbai, Singapore, Sofia, and Tokyo.

We are leading the industry's green transition, enabling our partners to leverage data for actionable decarbonisation efforts.

Senior Data Engineer at ZeroNorth

Zeronorth is developing an industry leading agentic platform for maritime operations. We are looking for an ambitious engineer to join our ‘Data for Sensing’ team. The team owns the ingestion and processing of external real world data; making it readily available to all internal product teams.The team is in charge of turning those feeds into data products and insights. As agentic workflows take a more significant space in our company, we are looking for an individual who can also address and evaluate the shift where a data consumer can also be an AI agent rather than a human analyst/software engineer, which changes the data design.

You will work with a team of talented engineers with great and profound knowledge of the existing data ecosystem. We put a lot of emphasis on collaborative communication which we believe is key for success. You will design and evolve the data platform to serve our agentic maritime platforms of the future including the estate-level view:data freshness, costs, cataloging, governance lineage and a clear view of where quality is sufficient and where it needs improvement.

Key responsibilities:

• Data modelling: Rigorous entity and relational modelling. Keys, dependencies, normalisation through 3NF and beyond, with denormalisation applied deliberately at the serving layer. Expert SQL assumed.
• Resilient pipelines at scale: Batch and streaming design covering orchestration, idempotency, backfills, and late-arriving data, with immutable raw capture enabling full reprocessing. Failures must be diagnosable from the outside. Large datasets across warehouses, lakes, and distributed processing, with sound judgement on partitioning, skew, and cost.
• High-performance APIs: Design a serving layer where latency budgets hold under load and contracts are bulletproof. For most consumers, the API is the product, and here that consumer is an agent, so provenance, freshness, and confidence are fields in the response.
• Applied mathematics and analysis: Time series, interpolation and extrapolation, uncertainty, and clustering, applied to imperfect weather and sensor data. Units, time zones, and rounding are treated as correctness concerns. Hypotheses formed, tested against the data, and reported with a stated level of confidence. Familiarity with ML concepts, such as feature management, data drift, and training-serving skew, sufficient to build robust data foundations and collaborate credibly with Data Scientists.
• Provider sourcing and evaluation: Assessment of external data providers on coverage, latency, licensing, and cost, documented as an actionable recommendation. Direct technical engagement with provider teams.
• Customer value and product collaboration: Close work with product teams on scope and sequencing, recognising that a pipeline delivers value only once it reaches a customer. Proper investigation of data complaints, explained in terms a non-technical audience can act upon.
• Agentic ways of working: Active use and advancement of agentic tooling, with repositories, documentation, and tooling structured to serve humans and agents alike, and generated output verified rather than assumed.

Your profile:

• Creative systems thinking: Holds the feed, the model, the contract, the API, and the agent consuming it as one system, and reasons about second-order effects before building. When the obvious approach does not fit the data, revisits design before reimplementing i.e. tries to work from existing systems with incremental improvements.
• Innovator's mindset: Curious by default and a fast learner. Leans into what agentic systems make possible and treats a new technology or methodology as something to try out. Thrives in ambiguity and takes end-to-end ownership when it serves the broader strategy, rather than sticking to rigid team boundaries.
• Owns the contract, not the pipeline: Success is the consumer never being surprised. A green orchestration run over silently stale data is a failure. Ensures a common definition of data fields and schemas. Ensures alignment across stakeholders and data producers for common shared data fields.
• Data quality balanced against delivery: Completeness, freshness, lineage, and checks that fail loudly rather than silently. Committed dates treated as real, with explicit acknowledgement when sufficiency is chosen over perfection.

Technology:

Our core stack is Python and SQL on AWS and Snowflake, integrating complex external feeds like gridded numerical weather, AIS, and global fleet registries. However, we hire for engineering fundamentals, not just stack-matching.

Level:

Senior Data Engineer. A degree in computer science or equivalent depth, with 5+ years delivering production data systems, and a strong intuition for performance, scalability, and cost trade-offs

Nice to have:

Maritime knowledge, model training, geospatial experience.

About ZeroNorth

At ZeroNorth, we aim to make global trade sustainable by steering the maritime industry toward zero emissions. Using advanced technology and trusted data, our platform delivers real-time insights to optimize operations and align commercial success with environmental impact.

We partner with customers on their journey toward sustainability, solving complex challenges and empowering informed decisions that benefit both the planet and their bottom line.

Our culture thrives on growth, inclusion, and collaboration. We value honesty, trust, and the unique contributions of every team member, driving meaningful change together.

Let's make global trade green.