Senior Data Engineer

Dabble; City of Brisbane; Remote; AUD 155,000 - 175,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Five weeks of paid annual leave

Paid parental leave

Flexibility with working hours

Access to wellness support

Annual cash bonus based on performance

Workplace recognition on company birthday

Job summary

A leading gaming company in Australia is looking for a Senior Data Engineer to shape their real-time data platform built on Databricks. The role involves technical leadership, driving the design and reliability of data pipelines, and modernizing legacy systems. Candidates should possess strong Databricks expertise, experience with Kafka and Debezium, and the ability to mentor a team. This position offers a competitive salary between $155,000 and $175,000 plus benefits, reflecting the company’s commitment to innovation and collaboration.

Qualifications

• Strong Databricks expertise in Spark and Delta Lake.
• Experience in building and operating batch and streaming pipelines.
• Deep understanding of event-time processing and data correctness.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve a Databricks Lakehouse.
• Own low-latency streaming pipelines with a focus on performance.
• Lead migration from legacy systems to Databricks.

Skills

Databricks expertise

Building production-grade pipelines

Streaming architectures

Kafka and Debezium

Strong SQL proficiency

Troubleshooting distributed systems

Tools

Databricks

Kafka

Debezium

Terraform

Job description

In Australia, Dabble has been operating a licensed sportsbook under the NTRWC since 2021. We're here to deliver extraordinary - with a truly immersive socialised betting experience designed to provide evolutionary entertainment to our punters via genuine interaction and engagement. We have office hubs in Darwin, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, and Albury. While we support remote-friendly work, we also encourage our people to take advantage of our national network of offices, offering cross-office sponsored flights year‑round to promote collaboration and connection. Our global operations span multiple markets, including our innovative Daily Fantasy Sports app servicing the United States which launched in 2023, and our latest launch into the UK in 2025! We are a team of highly driven enthusiasts and we are looking for our next Dabbler to join us as we continue in our journey.

Dabble Culture

• Dress for your day so you can focus on what matters
• Switch up your office, work from home, work from wherever helps you to deliver
• Genuine, like‑minded team of visionaries. We welcome ideas big and small!
• Scheduled focus time to encourage deep thought
• Our annual convention, Dabblecon, brings us all together to celebrate our successes and plan continued evolution over the coming year
• Each day is led through upholding our core Values: Fun, Celebratory, Community, Evolutionary and Focus

Dabble Perks

• Five weeks of paid annual leave for all Dabblers
• Paid parental leave for both primary and secondary caregiver
• We encourage you to visit our network of offices: sponsored flights available to staff and spouse/immediate family
• Flexibility with working hours to accommodate our cross‑country employee base: you are free to manage your own time
• Your wellness is our genuine concern: We sponsor access to the Sonder app for employees and their families with 24/7 support across mental health, medical advice, safety support and more
• Up to 10% annual cash bonus based on Company performance metrics
• Dabble Day Dividend: all Dabblers split the day’s revenue evenly on our birthday each year. You share the workload, why shouldn’t you share the reward?

Overview

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join Dabble and play a key role in shaping our mission‑critical, real‑time data platform built on Databricks. In this role, you’ll provide technical leadership to a team of data engineers, driving the design, evolution, and reliability of high‑throughput streaming and CDC pipelines. You’ll work extensively with Kafka and Debezium‑based change data capture, delivering low‑latency data processing and ensuring data accuracy, scalability, and resilience across the platform. You’ll lead the migration of legacy data systems into our modern Databricks Lakehouse architecture, enhance and optimise existing pipelines, and define engineering standards across streaming and batch workloads. Balancing hands‑on technical delivery with architectural leadership, you’ll mentor engineers, influence technical direction, and ensure our data platform meets strict requirements around performance, correctness, availability, and cost efficiency in a fast‑paced production environment. This is an opportunity to shape the future of data at Dabble while building highly scalable systems that power real‑time experiences across the business.

Primary Location

This role is currently open to Melbourne candidates only.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of a mission‑critical Databricks Lakehouse supporting real‑time streaming and batch workloads
• Own high‑throughput, low‑latency streaming and CDC pipelines (Kafka, Debezium) with strong emphasis on correctness, ordering, recovery, and fast propagation of changes
• Enhance and modernise existing pipelines, improving reliability, performance, observability, and maintainability
• Lead migration of data and pipelines from legacy platforms into Databricks with minimal risk and disruption
• Define and enforce engineering standards for data modelling, schema evolution, streaming semantics, performance tuning, lifecycle management, governance, and security
• Establish SLAs/SLOs and design monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes for predictable latency, freshness, and availability
• Drive cost and performance optimisation across compute, storage, and streaming infrastructure
• Design and maintain curated datasets and implement data quality, validation, and reconciliation frameworks
• Provide technical leadership through architectural guidance, code/design reviews, mentorship, and cross‑team collaboration
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code (Pulumi/Terraform) and automated testing frameworks for pipelines and infrastructure

Skills & Qualifications

Required

• Strong Databricks expertise (Spark, Delta Lake, orchestration, production performance optimisation)
• Proven experience building and operating production‑grade batch and streaming pipelines
• Deep understanding of streaming architectures, event‑time processing, and exactly‑once/effectively‑once semantics
• Hands‑on experience with Kafka and Debezium for CDC in low‑latency environments
• Strong SQL and proficiency in at least one data engineering language
• Experience modernising existing data platforms and improving reliability and performance
• Strong troubleshooting skills in distributed systems and ability to mentor engineers

Preferred

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and/or Pulumi)
• Experience in real‑time analytics or event‑driven systems
• Experience with data governance and cost optimisation in Databricks

Are you a Dabbler?

A Dabbler’s attitude is paramount, as the right person will be able to learn quickly and adapt to any skill gaps. A Dabbler is always a team player, with a willingness to share with and learn from others. Being a remote‑first workplace, collaborative working styles are crucial to empower and grow each individual member (eg we prefer openness via public channels to problem solve or ideate on Slack). A Dabbler uses their freedom of autonomy to its absolute potential and enjoys contributing to the Dabble community. We hold respect for our peers very highly – there is no such thing as a bad idea. We encourage you to think differently, be brave and strive to always raise the bar. Dabble was born out of thought sharing and should tackle growth in the same way. Dabble embraces empowerment of all people at any level of seniority and experience to ‘own their work’ and ‘talk their book’ wherever they can.

A fulfilling life extends beyond work, and we encourage our employees to prioritise self‑care and well being. This means taking breaks when needed, setting boundaries, and seeking support when facing challenges. We are committed to creating a safe environment where individuals feel comfortable discussing their wellbeing and accessing resources when necessary.

Remuneration

The advertised salary for this position is $155,000 - $175,000 + Super + Benefits.