Sr. Python Data Engineer (Chicago, IL or Denver, CO)

FreeWheel, a Comcast company, provides comprehensive ad platforms for publishers, advertisers, and media buyers. Powered by premium video content, robust data, and advanced technology, we're making it easier for buyers and sellers to transact across all screens, data types, and sales channels. As a global company, we have offices in nine countries and can insert advertisements around the world.
Job Summary
FreeWheel, a Comcast global advertising technology company, powers the buying, selling, and delivery of premium video advertising across linear TV, connected TV (CTV), and streaming platforms. FreeWheel provides enterprise-scale software and marketplaces that enables programmatic ad‑tech solutions that help media owners, advertisers, and agencies manage, monetize, and measure advertising across linear TV, streaming, and digital video.
Job Description
About the Team
This team is responsible for unifying data ingestion and pipeline strategies across FreeWheel, ensuring high‑performance, scalable, and reliable data flows that power analytics, reporting, and downstream ad‑tech systems.
The team owns the end‑to‑end data ingestion platform, focusing on performance optimization, architectural consistency, and modern cloud‑native design across multiple data sources and services.
Role Overview
We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to drive the design, performance, and evolution of FreeWheel's data pipeline and ingestion systems. This role emphasizes data pipeline performance, distributed system design, and technical leadership, while partnering closely with platform, data, and product teams.
You will play a key role in defining ingestion standards, leading architectural decisions, and ensuring that pipelines scale reliably across FreeWheel's ad‑tech ecosystem.
Core Responsibilities:
Data Pipeline & Platform Engineering

• Design, build, and optimize high‑throughput data ingestion pipelines supporting large‑scale advertising data
• Improve pipeline performance, reliability, and observability across distributed systems
• Lead architectural decisions for unified ingestion frameworks across FreeWheel platforms
• Develop and maintain Python‑based microservices supporting real‑time and batch ingestion

Technical Leadership & Design

• Serve as a technical leader, driving best practices in system design, performance tuning, and scalability
• Author and review technical design documents for complex distributed systems
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across the team
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with data engineering, platform, and product partners

Data Systems & Analytics Enablement

• Work with Snowflake as a distributed data platform to support downstream analytics and reporting
• Optimize ingestion patterns for analytics‑ready data models
• Ensure data quality, consistency, and traceability across ingestion layers

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building data pipelines or distributed backend systems using Python
• Strong proficiency in Python and microservices‑based architectures
• Hands‑on experience with AWS cloud infrastructure
• Production experience with CI/CD, Terraform, and Kubernetes
• Experience working with distributed data systems (Snowflake or Spark strongly preferred)
• SQL querying
• Proven ability to lead design discussions and influence architectural decisions
• Strong understanding of system performance, scalability, and fault tolerance

Preferred Qualifications

• Snowpark or DataBricks experience
• Experience in ad tech, media, or data‑intensive platforms
• Familiarity with both batch and streaming ingestion patterns
• Experience unifying or standardizing ingestion across multiple teams or platforms
• Background in performance monitoring, observability, and cost optimization in cloud environments

Employees at all levels are expected to:

• Understand our Operating Principles; make them the guidelines for how you do your job.
• Own the customer experience - think and act in ways that put our customers first, give them seamless digital options at every touchpoint, and make them promoters of our products and services.
• Know your stuff - be enthusiastic learners, users and advocates of our game-changing technology, products and services, especially our digital tools and experiences.
• Win as a team - make big things happen by working together and being open to new ideas.
• Be an active part of the Net Promoter System - a way of working that brings more employee and customer feedback into the company - by joining huddles, making call backs and helping us elevate opportunities to do better for our customers.
• Drive results and growth.
• Support a culture of inclusion in how you work and lead.
• Do what's right for each other, our customers, investors and our communities.

Disclaimer:

• This information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees in this role. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications.

Comcast is an equal opportunity workplace. We will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.
Skills:
Java; Python (Programming Language); Go Programming Language
Salary:
Primary Location Pay Range: $129,515.93 - $194,273.89
Additional Range: This job can be performed in Illinois, and Denver Campus with a Pay Range of $129,515.93 - $203,525.03
Comcast intends to offer the selected candidate base pay within this range, dependent on job-related, non-discriminatory factors such as experience. The application window is 30 days from the date job is posted, unless the number of applicants requires it to close sooner or later.
The application window is 30 days from the date job is posted, unless the number of applicants requires it to close sooner or later.
Base pay is one part of the Total Rewards that Comcast provides to compensate and recognize employees for their work. Most sales positions are eligible for a Commission under the terms of an applicable plan, while most non-sales positions are eligible for a Bonus. Additionally, Comcast provides best-in-class Benefits to eligible employees. We believe that benefits should connect you to the support you need when it matters most, and should help you care for those who matter most. That's why we provide an array of options, expert guidance and always-on tools, that are personalized to meet the needs of your reality - to help support you physically, financially and emotionally through the big milestones and in your everyday life. Please visit the compensation and benefits summary on our careers site for more details.
Education
Bachelor's Degree
While possessing the stated degree is preferred, Comcast also may consider applicants who hold some combination of coursework and experience, or who have extensive related professional experience.
Relevant Work Experience
7-10 Years