Senior Manager - Data Engineering
Love what you do and leave your mark
Hybrid ways of working - Sydney or Melbourne location
Enterprise Ecosystem Impact: Architect the "paved road" delivery ecosystem, translating conceptual data architecture into scalable, production-grade pipelines.
Generative AI Innovation: Spearhead the pragmatic rollout of Generative and Agentic AI tools to elevate engineering workflows, documentation, and code validation.
As the Senior Manager - Data Engineering , you will serve as the primary IP Guardian for core data engineering standards, platform integrations, and high-performance data pipelines across our enterprise. Operating under a modern System-Builder Paradigm, this role moves beyond traditional line management to architect and scale our delivery ecosystem. In close collaboration with Data Architects, you will translate architectural blueprints into robust, production-ready engineering standards, pipeline templates, and automated delivery guardrails. Your core delivery philosophy is enablement: building self-service systems and establishing a "paved road" so that the right way to build is also the fastest, simplest path of least resistance for both internal squads and external partners. With a strong bias for action, you will champion incremental delivery over theoretical design, lead an internal cohort of 8-10 data engineers, and govern multi-million-dollar partner delivery across modern cloud and data ecosystems.
Sounds good? Read on.
Here is a taster of what you can expect in this role:
- System Delivery Enablement: Architect and maintain the "paved road" for data engineering by building self-service pipeline templates, automated CI/CD checks, and dbt testing suites that remove friction for delivery squads.
- Engineering IP Guardianship: Act as the custodian of backend data assets, operationalising blueprints into reusable pipeline patterns and certifying Gold-layer models and enterprise data registries via Informatica.
- People Capability Leadership: Directly guide, mentor, and develop an internal cohort of 8-10 data engineers, stepping back from day-to-day coding to foster technical mastery and team capability at scale.
- Partner Vendor Governance: Embed rigorous technical acceptance criteria, runtime efficiency targets, and milestone gates into fixed-outcome Statements of Work (SOWs), holding external partners to the "Self-Onboarding Standard".
- Data Reliability Standards: Establish enterprise-grade observability, data quality monitoring, and operational alerting frameworks to ensure Gold-layer datasets consistently meet downstream consumer SLAs.
- Cloud Compute Efficiency: Partner with enterprise FinOps functions to implement automated cost and resource guardrails across BigQuery, cloud storage, and orchestration tooling.
- Pragmatic Delivery Momentum: Champion continuous value delivery and iterative execution, making steady progress on active initiatives while systematically retiring legacy technical debt.
- Modern Workflow Automation: Drive the practical adoption of Generative and Agentic AI tooling across backend engineering workflows to accelerate testing and streamline technical documentation.
Now let's talk about you:
- Proven People Leadership: Extensive track record leading and mentoring data engineering teams (managing 8-10 direct reports), with the ability to step back from hands‑on coding to lead at an ecosystem level.
- Cloud Platform Mastery: Deep technical expertise in modern cloud data platforms (primarily Google Cloud Platform/GCP, with supporting knowledge of Databricks) and enterprise governance suites such as Informatica (IICS).
- Modern Pipeline Modelling: Demonstrated success translating architectural blueprints into production-ready ELT pipelines, Medallion/Kimball data models, and automated dbt transformation workflows.
- Automated Ecosystem Tooling: Proven background in implementing Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), robust CI/CD deployment pipelines, automated testing, and comprehensive observability suites.
- Commercial Vendor Governance: Strong commercial acumen with experience scoping fixed-outcome SOWs, establishing technical acceptance criteria, auditing vendor deliverables, and administering augmented resources.
- Unified Capability Mindset: A collaborative leadership style with an instinct to partner cross-functionally alongside Data Science, Full-Stack Engineering, Analytics, and Product peers to deliver holistic business outcomes.
- Pragmatic Delivery Mindset: A strong bias for action, composed temperament under delivery pressure, and the communication skills to translate complex technical trade‑offs into compelling business value for commercial leaders.
The benefits are good too!
We offer hybrid ways of working
An exclusive discount card for our ALH Hotels pubs & accommodation, BWS, Dan Murphy's and other Endeavour Group brands. Through our partnership with Woolworths, you’ll also enjoy discounts at Woolies supermarkets and BIG W
As a valued member of the team,