Lead Data Platform Developer

Key Role

We're looking for an experienced professional to lead the development and operation of production-grade data pipelines. The ideal candidate will have strong leadership skills, hands-on experience with data engineering, DevOps, and API management.

• Technical Direction & Delivery: Set technical direction, drive delivery, and ensure timely outcomes across ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and APIs.
• Data Pipeline Design & Operation: 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; tune SQL for performance.
• API Management & 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; 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 & Documentation: Operate async-first; produce concise docs (data contracts, mappings, runbooks, RFCs); collaborate closely with product/engineering/analytics across time zones.

Requirements

• 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 AI assistants to accelerate work—while exercising judgment and writing your own code/tests.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Mentoring, interviewing, onboarding, and raising code quality standards.
• Regulatory/compliance awareness (e.g., data protection or public-sector standards) and how it impacts design/operations.
• Analytics exposure (dim/fact modeling, BI consumption patterns).
• Data platform architecture exposure (storage/layout choices, catalog/lineage, governance concepts).
• Familiarity with Kafka, streaming/message queues, and columnar formats (e.g., Parquet).
• Experience with cloud monitoring stacks (Azure Monitor/Application Insights, CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, etc.).

BENEFITS AND DETAILS

• Duration: 10+ months (extension/full-time possible).
• Schedule: Flexible, with overlap for key meetings across time zones.
• Compensation: Competitive.
• Mode: Remote.

HOW TO APPLY

• Resume/CV highlighting data engineering, DevOps/IaC, and/or API/auth work.
• Brief note (one paragraph) about a recent pipeline/service: requirements, your role, tech, validation/tests, deployment/ops, outcome.
• Links to code samples or design docs (if available/shareable).