Senior Data Engineer

Introduction

By bringing people and businesses together, connecting cultures, and transporting essential goods. Because we care about this planet, we want to take responsibility for future generations. And that means doing things in a sustainable way. This involves investing in clean, quiet, and efficient aircraft. As a result, we aim to operate as cleanly as possible — not only in the air, but also throughout our processes.

KLM is essentially a large chain of thousands of complex processes. Different departments work together to keep the machine running as efficiently as possible. From selling tickets and preparing customers or cargo for travel, to the operation itself and post-service care. At every step, we generate massive amounts of operational data — some of it clean and well-defined, some still underutilized and gathering metaphorical rust.

Our department, Next Gen Process Design, works across all KLM departments. We create new feedback loops to fuel our most ambitious models — models that aim to fulfill our strategy of enabling memorable experiences on the planet we care for. As a strategic program, we’re not looking for small tweaks. We're aiming for system change. Enterprise-wide data is our fuel — often in raw form. This is data for a passionate data engineer who’s not afraid to roll up their sleeves.

What are you going to do?

Our challenges are similar to those at other large (aviation) companies: finding, preparing, extracting, and integrating a highly diverse landscape of data. Existing data, and when needed, newly defined and created data — all revolving around our core process: transporting passengers and cargo.

Our ideal candidate enjoys processing streaming data (think terabytes) and knows their way around Scala and Kafka. Every few minutes, a new data dump arrives, ready to be used to check whether our predictions still match reality. Of course, everything is moving to the cloud — specifically GCP — so being able to intelligently aggregate, partition, compare, and prepare data for analysis from multiple sources is key. Your expertise in Google BigQuery will be one of our greatest assets. As a driven, self-starting enthusiast, you'll proactively search for new data sources — data the company may have but can’t quite locate, never considered before, or that everyone wants access to. Since we work across departments, communication and networking are essential.

Deploying data pipelines and APIs, building infrastructure with Terraform on GCP, industrializing machine learning — this excites you. All of it while adapting to a passionate and fast-moving team. You’ll help us solve the puzzle, which means shifting priorities, evolving architectures, and changing plans are part of the game.

Where do you land?

You’ll join the central Data, OR, and AI department and start your first assignment with Next Gen Process Design. It’s a passionate, relatively young team (except for the manager — but don’t mention that to him) dedicated to real change. We believe that, by working with experts, we can drive meaningful transformation. Artificial Intelligence (or less buzzwordy: better predictions) has huge potential — but it only works if the company as a whole, not just individual departments, focuses on what we want to optimize.

Together with senior data science experts, strategic designers, and that slightly older but highly experienced manager (who’s been around long enough to know how things work), we’re aiming for system change. But not just high-level strategy talk — we’re focused on short-term impact. Only when we implement are we truly successful. Together with the departments, we strive to grow the pie for the whole company.

Your profile

• A bachelor’s or higher degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field — but we’re open to being convinced by experience.
• Proven experience building production-ready data processing systems as a Data Engineer using cloud technologies (GCP preferred).
• Recent hands-on experience with Scala and at least one other server-side language like Python or Java.
• Strong understanding of common algorithms and data structures.
• Knowledge of CI/CD techniques.
• Affinity with Machine Learning and/or Operations Research concepts.
• Nice-to-have: Terraform (IaC), CI/CD

Competencies