Fractional Remote Data Engineer

Why?

You need data engineers to build and operate your company’s data infrastructure, and reliable data infrastructure is critical to your success. However, experienced data engineers take a long time to find and recruit, and as a startup, time is your most precious resource.

If you’re actively trying to hire a data infrastructure team, I can get things up and running while those people are being hired, laying a solid foundation for the future. If you already have an infrastructure team but have no subject matter expertise in data, I can provide that expertise. If your team has the expertise but is resource-constrained, I can help accelerate your technical roadmap and take some of the pressure off of them.

How It Works

During our work together, I embed myself into your team as a remote, part-time member of your technical staff. While embedded, I’ll do just about anything a full-time member of your team would do - I just can’t be in your on-call rotation.

Many of my clients opt to loan me a corporate laptop for the duration of our contract for security and compliance reasons. I can also use my own hardware if you’d prefer that.

During our work together, I’ll send you a synopsis of what I’ve done that week, what I’m expecting to accomplish next week, and anything we need to discuss to keep work going smoothly. I want to make sure you know exactly what you’re paying for.

Scheduling & Rates

I work with at most two clients at a time, and guarantee each client two days of my time every week. These two days are billed at a flat daily rate. I tend to reserve the fifth day in each week for advisory and administrative work, but if a client has additional needs in a given week and I’m available, I offer the third day on a first-come, first-served basis at a slightly elevated rate. Whenever I can’t provide a full two days of work in a given week (due to holidays or illness), you’ll only pay for the days that I’m working.

I don’t do fixed-bid development work. I’ve found that the scope of clients’ needs tend to expand unpredictably during engagements, and a fixed daily rate coupled with a fixed contract term gives us the flexibility to adapt to changing priorities quickly while bounding the amount of unpredictability in your spend at the same time.

Contracts are a minimum of one month, and are typically three to six months with the option to renew at the end of the contract term. Several of my clients have opted to renew their contracts one quarter at a time across multiple years. Existing clients are given the option to renew before I release that time to prospective clients.

Interested?

If this sounds interesting to you, I’d love to talk further. Email alex@bitsondisk.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn.