Lead consultant

Withum is a place where talent thrives - where who you are matters. It's a place of endless opportunities for growth. A place where entrepreneurial energy plus inclusive teamwork equals exponential results. Withum empowers clients and our professional staff with innovative tools and solutions to address their accounting, tax and overall business management and operational needs. As a US nationally ranked Top 25 firm, we recruit only the best and brightest people with a genuine passion for the business.We are seeking an experienced Lead Consultant – Data Engineering with a strong background in consulting services and hands-on skills in building modern, scalable data platforms and pipelines. This is a client-facing, delivery-focused role. Please note that this position is centered around external client delivery and is not part of an internal IT or product engineering team.This is a foundational hire. You will be responsible for delivering hands-on client work, support for our proprietary data products, and building the team underneath you.Withum's brand is a reflection of our people, our culture and our strength. Withum has become synonymous with teamwork and client service excellence. The cornerstone of our success can truly be accredited to the dedicated professionals who work here every day, easy to work with a sense of purpose and caring for their co-workers and whose mission is to help our clients grow and thrive. But our commitment goes beyond our clients as we continue to live the Withum Way, promoting personal and professional growth for all team members, clients, and surrounding communities.How You'll Spend Your Time: Architect, implement, and optimize data transformation pipelines, data lakes, and cloud-native warehouses for mid- and upper mid-market clients.Deliver hands-on engineering work across client environments — building fast, scalable, and well-documented pipelines that support both analytics and AI use cases.Lead technical design and execution using tools such as Tableau, Microsoft Fabric, Synapse, Power BI, Snowflake, and Databricks.Also have a good hands-on familiarity with SQL Databases.Optimize for sub-50 GB datasets and local or lightweight cloud execution where appropriate — minimizing unnecessary reliance on cluster-based compute.Collaborate with subject-matter experts to understand business use cases prior to designing data model.Operate as a client-facing consultant: conduct discovery, define solutions, and lead agile project delivery.Switch context rapidly across 2–3 active clients or service streams in a single day.Provide support for our proprietary data products as needed.Provide advisory and strategic input to clients on data modernization, AI enablement, and FP&A transformation efforts.Deliver workshops, demos, and consultative training to business and technical stakeholders.Ability to implement coding modifications to pre-existing code/procedures in a manner that results in a validated case study (i.e. if done properly, the result will be "xyz" and the total amount will reconcile to "abc").Take full ownership of hiring, onboarding, and mentoring future data engineers and analysts within the India practice.During bench time, contribute to building internal data products and tooling — powering our own consulting operations (e.g., utilization dashboards, delivery intelligence, practice forecasting).Help define and scale delivery methodology, best practices, and reusable internal accelerators for future engagements.Ability to communicate openly about conflicting deadlines to ensure prioritization aligns with client expectations, with ample time to reset client expectations as needed.Ensure coding is properly commented to help explain logic or purpose behind more complex sections of code.Requirements:6+ years of hands-on experience in data engineering roles, at least 3+ years in a consulting or client delivery environment.Proven ability to context-switch, self-prioritize, and communicate clearly under pressure.Demonstrated experience owning full lifecycle delivery, from architecture through implementation and client handoff.Strong experience designing and implementing ETL / ELT pipelines, preferably in SQL-first tools (e.g., dbt core, SQLMesh, Duck DB).Experience with Microsoft SQL server / SSIS for maintenance and development of ETL processes.Real-world experience with SQL Databases, Databricks, Snowflake, and/or Synapse — and a healthy skepticism of when to use them.Deep understanding of data warehousing, data lakes, data modeling, and incremental processing.Proficient in Python for ETL scripting, automation, and integration work.Experience with dbt core a comparable tool such as SQLMesh, Dataform, etc, in production environments.Strong practices around data testing, version control, documentation, and team-based dev workflows.Working knowledge of Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or similar BI tools — enough to support downstream teams but not as your primary skillset.Experience building platforms for AI/ML workflows or supporting agentic architectures.Familiarity with Microsoft Fabric's Lakehouse implementation, Delta Lake, Iceberg, and Parquet.Background in Data Ops, CI/CD for data pipelines, and metadata management.Microsoft certifications (e.g., Azure Data Engineer, Fabric Analytics Engineer) are a plusWebsite: will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, marital status, genetic information, disability or because he or she is a protected veteran.