Lead Data Platform Engineer

We're seeking a seasoned technical leader to spearhead the development and operation of our data infrastructure. As Lead Data Engineer - Cloud Architect, you'll set strategic direction, drive delivery, and collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to build scalable, secure, and high-performing data platforms.

• Technical Leadership: Scope projects, manage dependencies, and unblock engineers to deliver outcomes on time.
• Architecture & Direction: Define target states, make informed decisions on build/buy, and drive cost/performance guardrails.
• Data Pipelines: Design, build, and operate reliable batch and change-driven pipelines, schedule/orchestrate jobs, and handle schema evolution.
• Transformations & Modeling: Implement clean, tested merge/transformation pipelines and produce models that are easy to consume for products and analytics.
• APIs & Integration: Build or collaborate on APIs for data access/updates, design request/response contracts, and handle auth (OAuth2/OIDC/JWT).
• Infrastructure & DevOps: Provision/manage cloud resources with Terraform, automate build/test/deploy with CI/CD, and write solid shell scripts for glue/ops tasks.
• Observability & Reliability: Instrument logs/metrics/traces, define SLOs and on-call runbooks, lead incident reviews, and drive root-cause prevention.
• Security & Compliance: Apply least-privilege access, secrets management, and encryption in transit/at rest, partner on compliance requirements.
• Quality & Standards: Champion unit/integration/data-quality tests (including SQL), enforce code health via reviews, linters, and CI checks.
• Collaboration & Docs: Operate async-first, produce concise docs (data contracts, mappings, runbooks, RFCs), and collaborate closely with product/engineering/analytics across time zones.

• Proven Leadership: Led engineers or owned large, multi-team projects, comfortable running design reviews and giving actionable feedback.
• Strong SQL & RDBMS Fundamentals: Proven skills in SQL (tuning, indexing, query plans) and solid RDBMS fundamentals (e.g., Postgres, SQL Server, MySQL).
• Coding Skills: Proficient in Python for data work and services, comfortable with shell scripting (bash preferred; Powershell acceptable).
• Terraform & IaC: Experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) fundamentals, CI/CD experience (version control workflows, automated tests, environment promotion).
• Cloud Experience: Strong background in cloud computing (Azure preferred; AWS also acceptable), knowledge of storage, compute, identity, monitoring.
• Data Integration: Ingestion (batch + change-driven), orchestration, schema/versioning, resilient retries/replays.
• Workflow Orchestration: Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Prefect preferred; Airflow/Dagster also acceptable).
• APIs & Auth: REST patterns, pagination, validation, rate limiting, OAuth2/OIDC/JWT.
• Observability: Logs/metrics/traces and actionable alerts/dashboards.
• Testing Mindset: Habit of writing tests for code and SQL, fixtures/test data, CI.
• Communication: Clear written/verbal comms, practiced cross-timezone collaboration.
• Ai Tooling: Familiarity with AI tooling like Claude Code, while exercising judgment and writing own code/tests.

This role offers opportunities for growth, professional development, and collaboration with a talented team of engineers and product managers. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, and strive to create an environment where everyone feels welcome and empowered to contribute their best work.

We're looking for someone who is passionate about building scalable, secure, and high-performing data platforms. If you have a strong foundation in cloud architecture, data engineering, and technical leadership, we'd love to hear from you