Platform, Data & AI Engineering Lead

Contango; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 420,000 - 660,000; Full time

Job summary

Contango seeks an experienced Platform, Engineering & Data Technical Lead to own the onshore technical authority for a major transformation program in Abu Dhabi. You will oversee orchestration, data platform, and AI-enabled capabilities across multi-workstreams, driving architecture, standards, risk controls, and production readiness.

The role requires hands-on leadership, technical depth, and ability to align technical decisions with business outcomes for senior stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 10+ years across enterprise technology delivery, combining solution architecture, platform engineering, and data engineering.
• Hands-on experience with modern cloud data platforms (Databricks preferred), lakehouse architecture, data modeling, and pipeline design.
• Strong cloud platform experience (Azure preferred) - IaC, RBAC, CI/CD, and monitoring.
• Experience onboarding structured and unstructured data, including document extraction and accuracy tuning.
• Practical experience delivering AI/LLM-enabled capabilities within enterprise applications or workflows.
• Ability to translate technical decisions into business outcomes for senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Act as the senior technical interface to client stakeholders, the incumbent data platform vendor, and parallel initiatives
• Own the end-to-end technical solution across orchestration and data workstreams, ensuring architectural coherence across all components
• Help define architecture components across infrastructure, security, RBAC, data, etc.
• Make and document key technology decisions; surface technical risks and dependencies through governance forums
• Establish and enforce engineering standards - CI/CD pipelines, code review gates, quality controls, etc.
• Provide technical assurance over orchestration platform setup and integration and oversee sprint planning, testing, defect triage, and release readiness
• Own technical go-live sign-off, including cutover and rollback planning
• Lead and mentor offshore engineering, platform, data, and QA teams
• Lead hypercare, stabilization, operations documentation, and knowledge transfer
• Oversee build of ingestion pipelines and transformation logic for structured and unstructured data
• Define the target data model, key business entities, and source-to-target mappings
• Establish data quality, validation, and reconciliation controls to support go-live readiness
• Define the technical approach for AI capabilities embedded within workflows
• Lead extraction and accuracy tuning of unstructured data to support smart features
• Implement evaluation criteria, human-in-the-loop patterns, and guardrails for security and cost control
• Provide technical oversight of the incumbent vendor's platform implementation
• Assess data platform readiness against orchestration requirements and identify gaps

Skills

Platform architecture

Data engineering

Cloud engineering

Databricks

CI/CD pipelines

RBAC security

AI capabilities

Leadership

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Databricks

Azure

CI/CD tools

Job description

Contango seeks an experienced Platform, Engineering & Data Technical Lead to own the onshore technical authority for a major transformation program in Abu Dhabi. You will oversee orchestration, data platform, and AI-enabled capabilities across multi-workstreams, driving architecture, standards, risk controls, and production readiness.

The role requires hands-on leadership, technical depth, and ability to align technical decisions with business outcomes for senior stakeholders.