Director, Data Platform Engineering & AI Enablement

Simple Machines; Sydney; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Simple Machines is seeking a senior data engineering leader in Sydney to join the Global Data Practice leadership team. This strategic, hands-on role shapes the future of our data platform capability across ANZ, defining propositions, strengthening technical capability, and helping clients modernise data ecosystems for an AI-native future.

The ideal candidate operates at executive, architectural and delivery levels, with deep experience in cloud-native data platforms, data products, governance,

Qualifications

• 10+ years in hands-on data engineering, data platforms or analytics.
• Experience consulting with enterprise clients.
• Proven pre-sales, proposal development and solution shaping skills.
• Experience architecting and delivering modern cloud-native data platforms at enterprise scale.
• Experience building data products and reusable enterprise data capabilities.
• Deep understanding of data mesh, governance and federated ownership.
• Experience designing platforms to support AI-native use cases and ML workflows.
• Strong knowledge of real-time and event-driven architectures and data streaming.

Responsibilities

• Be part of the Global Data Practice leadership team.
• Define and evolve Simple Machines' data platform propositions and technical direction.
• Advise clients on modern data platform strategy, architecture and operating models.
• Lead architecture for complex enterprise data platform and transformation programs.
• Engage in pre-sales, proposal shaping and executive stakeholder engagement.
• Build trusted relationships with technology partners and stay current with platform capabilities.
• Mentor teams and contribute to practice development across engineering.
• Drive AI enablement and data product initiatives across ANZ.

Skills

Hands-on data engineering

Data platforms

Analytics engineering

Data architecture

Consultancy experience

Pre-sales

Cloud-native data platforms

Data mesh

Real-time architectures

Platform tooling

GCP/AWS/Azure

Databricks

Snowflake

Kafka

Spark

dbt

Kubernetes

Airflow

ML/AI enablement

Job description

Simple Machines is seeking a senior data engineering leader in Sydney to join the Global Data Practice leadership team. This strategic, hands-on role shapes the future of our data platform capability across ANZ, defining propositions, strengthening technical capability, and helping clients modernise data ecosystems for an AI-native future.

The ideal candidate operates at executive, architectural and delivery levels, with deep experience in cloud-native data platforms, data products, governance,