Data Platform Leadership Role

Data Platform Leadership Role

The role of Lead Data Platform Engineer is a critical position that requires technical leadership and delivery expertise. As a hands-on engineer, you will be responsible for building and operating production-grade data pipelines, as well as leading the delivery of projects.

This position is perfect for someone who has experience in managing complex data systems, leading teams, and implementing innovative solutions.

In this role, you will work closely with cross-functional teams to design, develop, and deploy data platforms that meet the needs of the business.

As a Lead Data Platform Engineer, you will be responsible for:

• Technical Leadership & Delivery: Scope milestones, manage dependencies and risks, unblock engineers, communicate status to stakeholders, and land outcomes on time.
• Architecture & Direction: Define target states and data contracts, make build/buy calls, author RFCs, drive cost/performance guardrails, and reliability patterns.
• Data Pipelines: Design, build, and operate reliable batch and change-driven pipelines, schedule/orchestrate jobs, handle schema evolution and failures gracefully.
• Transformations & Modeling: Implement clean, tested merge/transformation pipelines, produce models that are easy to consume for products and analytics, and tune SQL for performance.
• APIs & Integration: Build or collaborate on APIs for data access/updates, design request/response contracts, handle auth (OAuth2/OIDC/JWT), idempotency, validation, and auditing.
• 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.

We are looking for someone who has:

• Proven leadership: led engineers or owned large, multi-team projects; comfortable running design reviews and giving actionable feedback.
• Strong SQL (tuning, indexing, query plans) and solid RDBMS fundamentals (e.g., Postgres, SQL Server, MySQL).
• Python for data work and services; comfortable with shell scripting (bash preferred; Powershell acceptable).
• Terraform and IaC fundamentals; CI/CD experience (version control workflows, automated tests, environment promotion).
• Cloud: Azure preferred (storage, compute, identity, monitoring). If not Azure, very strong AWS background.
• Data integration: Ingestion (batch + change-driven), orchestration, schema/versioning, resilient retries/replays.
• Workflow orchestration: Prefect preferred (flows/deployments, retries/backoff, scheduling, observability); 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: Ready to use Claude Code (and similar assistants) to accelerate work—while exercising judgment and writing your own code/tests.

We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, including:

• A flexible working arrangement that allows you to work from home or in the office.
• A comprehensive health insurance plan.
• A retirement savings plan with employer matching.
• Access to ongoing training and development opportunities.

This is a 10+ month contract with the possibility of extension or full-time conversion. We are open to discussing flexible schedules and remote work arrangements.