What the work actually is

You do the work you already do — build and document pipelines — except every artefact is logged as source material for task and rubric construction. That means writing the ELT job, but also the design note explaining why you chose incremental over full refresh, the runbook for the 3am Airflow failure, the review comments on a colleague's dbt model. Some seats on the project lean hands-on delivery; others lean toward documenting and structuring work produced by teammates from adjacent domains. You will be told which shape you are in, and both are treated as first-class contributions.

A caveat worth stating plainly: this posting carries a sales-oriented title, while the body of the description asks exclusively for data engineers. Mercor listings sometimes get retitled across a family of concurrent projects. Apply against the described requirement — SQL, Python, ETL/ELT, orchestration, streaming, warehousing — and expect the screen to test that, not selling.

What the screen looks for

  • Production ownership, not exposure. They want people who have been paged for a pipeline, not people who have read about Kafka. Expect follow-ups that push past tool names into failure modes, backfill strategy, schema evolution and cost.
  • Stack breadth with a real core. SQL and Python are non-negotiable. Around them: Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks, on AWS, GCP or Azure. Nobody expects all of them; they expect depth in some and honest boundaries around the rest.
  • Explanatory ability. Because the output feeds rubrics, an engineer who can articulate why a decision was correct is worth more than one who simply ships.

Vetting is a resume and work-history screen followed by a short domain assessment.

Logistics

Full-time, 40 hours per week, 14 September to 10 October 2026 — a fixed four-week window, not an open-ended engagement. Remote, but synchronous enough to matter: the team runs on a UK business-hours rhythm, so this is not a work-whenever arrangement. You must be based in the United Kingdom with the right to work there; this is stated as essential and is not negotiable at interview. You should not be carrying another commitment with significant hours during the window, though smaller side projects can be discussed. Rates of $140–200/hr have been observed on comparable Mercor engagements; treat that as reported, not promised.