Lead Data Engineer - Paid Media Insights

About the role

Better Collective is looking for a Lead Data Engineer to join the Paid Media Insights team in Nis, Serbia. The team owns the paid media domain: ad platform spend and delivery, affiliate and operator revenue and CRM, stitched into one user-level view of what a click was worth. It reports to the Senior Head of Paid Media Insights and works across Paid Media, Campaign, Commercial, CRM and platform teams.

Key responsibilities

• Own every data job in paid media: freshness, cost, reliability, alerting and the 07:30 incident before the spend review.
• Build the end-to-end user-level model that joins ad platform spend and delivery, affiliate and operator revenue and CRM.
• Ingest paid media sources on the platform's framework, handling schema changes and unannounced API changes.
• Build the domain's models from staging to the marts analysts query, plus the semantic layer.
• Run reverse ETL into ad platforms so conversion data lands where it changes bidding.
• Take over the paid media jobs the central team still runs for the team.
• Lead a group of engineers and act as technical lead: setting standards, reviewing, unblocking and growing them.
• Shape the domain's roadmap with the Senior Head of Paid Media Insights, analysts and business teams.
• Represent paid media in platform conversations, including how the team supports machine learning and data science.

Required profile

• Ownership mindset: willing to own a domain end to end, including incidents and the pager.
• Ability to break complex systems into simple parts and to explain them to non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong opinions about standards but able to work inside another team's infrastructure.
• Comfortable with AI tools and with working alongside marketers and analysts.
• Technically deep where it counts: production pipelines, performance, cost and reliability at scale.
• Paid media or attribution experience is a bonus.

Required skills

• Production pipelines in SQL and Python
• dbt and Dagster
• Cloud data warehousing (Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift experience transfers)
• Stack used: MotherDuck / DuckDB, DLT, AWS, reverse ETL and semantic layer tooling

What we offer

• Private health insurance and 100% paid sick leave
• Canteen with free meals and drinks
• Flexible working hours
• Additional vacation days after two years
• Modern office in the city centre with entertainment facilities

Applications are submitted by CV and cover letter in PDF, in English, until 28 November; expected start is as soon as possible. Hybrid work in Nis.