Senior Data Platform Engineer - Snowflake & dbt Architect

Carsales.com; City of Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 130,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Best Workplaces recognition

Parental leave 24 weeks

Hackathons & learning opportunities

Flexible hybrid work

Job summary

carsales is seeking a Senior Data Engineer for Data Platform Engineering to own a significant domain of our data platform, working with Snowflake, dbt Cloud, RabbitMQ, Postgres, and GitHub Actions to deliver reliable, scalable data pipelines.

You will mentor teammates, set standards for testing, observability, and governance, partner with product and analytics stakeholders, and explore AI tooling to improve throughput while protecting data privacy.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in SQL and Snowflake -clustering, pruning, warehouse sizing, result caching, Snowpipe, Streams, and Tasks.
• Expert-level dbt Cloud experience -model architecture, testing standards, incremental strategies, and (ideally) exposure to MetricFlow or semantic layers.
• Proven experience with event-driven and messaging architecture (RabbitMQ or equivalent) -exchange types, routing, dead-letter queues, and consumer/producer design.
• Solid Postgres experience in a production pipeline context -indexing, query optimisation, MVCC, and troubleshooting replication or performance issues.
• Working proficiency in .NET / C# is a plus -comfortable reading, triaging, and maintaining existing pipeline code without needing to be a full-time.NET developer.
• Strong grasp of data governance, privacy, and security practices, and a track record of building governance into pipelines from the start.
• Comfortable using AI coding assistants across the full development lifecycle, with a critical eye on output quality, data privacy, and cost.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, aligned with our values: (customer-obsessed, curious, connected).

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, quality, and evolution of a significant portion of our data platform, built on Snowflake, dbt Cloud, RabbitMQ, Postgres, and GitHub Actions.
• Lead performance tuning and cost optimisation across our Snowflake environment -query profiling, micro-partition analysis, clustering strategy, and warehouse configuration.
• Design model architecture in dbt Cloud, enforce testing standards, and guide the team on incremental strategy and modelling best practice.
• Architect scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines and define standards for error handling, observability, and pipeline design.
• Act as a technical representative for DPE with product, commercial, and analytics stakeholders, translating business requirements into data engineering solutions.
• Own significant platform domains and act as the escalation point for incidents within them -driving root cause analysis and systemic reliability improvements.
• Actively develop the capability of the wider team through mentoring, code review, and knowledge sharing, particularly in high-risk or concentrated-expertise areas.
• Evaluate and recommend AI tooling for the team, with a focus on responsible use, reliability, and auditability of AI-augmented pipelines.

Skills

SQL & Snowflake

dbt Cloud

RabbitMQ

Postgres

.NET/C#

Data governance

AI tools

Communication

Tools

Snowflake

dbt Cloud

RabbitMQ

PostgreSQL

.NET/C#

Job description

carsales is seeking a Senior Data Engineer for Data Platform Engineering to own a significant domain of our data platform, working with Snowflake, dbt Cloud, RabbitMQ, Postgres, and GitHub Actions to deliver reliable, scalable data pipelines.

You will mentor teammates, set standards for testing, observability, and governance, partner with product and analytics stakeholders, and explore AI tooling to improve throughput while protecting data privacy.