Must-Have Qualities

1. Strong SQL (Hands-On, Expert Level)

They will be tested deeply on SQL joins, aggregations, filtering, problem‑solving.

2. Real DBT Experience (Not just buzzword)

* Multiple years of building DBT models

* Comfortable with:

* DBT tests

* Incremental models

* Performance optimization

* Modeling strategies (star schema, fact/dim, OBT, layered approach)

3. Has Done Analytics Engineering Before

* Not just a “data plumber”

* Has worked directly with stakeholders

* Has translated business problems into data models

* Experience with BI dashboards/data products

4. Has Handled Large Datasets Not necessarily petabytes — but at least tens or hundreds of millions of rows so they understand:

* Compute costs

* Freshness strategies

* Incremental logic

* Performance tuning

5. Comfortable in Modern Data Stack

* Databricks

* Airflow

* SQL warehouses

* Python scripting

* Cloud experience (AWS)

DBT Engineer