The Lead Data Engineer is responsible for designing, developing, and optimizing data infrastructure to ensure reliable pipelines, scalable architecture, and high-quality data for analytics and business needs. The role includes leading a team of data engineers, collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders, and implementing best practices in data transformation, validation, governance, and cloud-based solutions.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Lead and mentor a team of data engineers, fostering collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.
- Define and enforce data engineering standards, coding practices, and architectural guidelines.
- Partner with data scientists, analysts, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable solutions.
- Design and maintain high-performance ETL/ELT pipelines and workflows.
- Build and optimize data lake, data warehouse, and streaming data solutions.
- Ensure systems support structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sources.
- Develop data transformation and preparation processes to deliver clean, reliable, analytics-ready datasets.
- Implement validation, anomaly detection, and automated quality checks to ensure accuracy and consistency.
- Define and execute data remediation strategies to resolve issues with minimal business disruption.
- Implement and manage cloud-based data platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
- Apply modern frameworks (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Airflow, DBT) for efficient data processing.
- Oversee data modeling, schema design, and database optimization (SQL/NoSQL).
- Ensure accuracy, consistency, and availability of data across platforms.
- Implement governance, lineage, validation frameworks, and security best practices.
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize pipelines to meet SLAs and performance benchmarks.
- Stay current with emerging data engineering and analytics technologies.
- Recommend improvements to systems, tools, and processes to enhance scalability, reliability, and quality.
- Other job-related activities that may be assigned from time to time.
JOB SPECIFICATIONS:
- Education - At least graduate with a Bachelor's or Master's Degree in IT, Computer Science, Engineering, or any related course.
- Related Work Experience -
- 7+ years of experience in data engineering, with at least 2-3 years in a leadership or senior technical role.
- Proven expertise in building and managing enterprise-level data pipelines and architectures.
- Strong experience with one or more cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Knowledge - Knowledgeable in the following:
- Proficiency in SQL and at least one programming language (Python, Java, Scala).
- Hands-on experience with big data tools (Spark, Hadoop, Kafka).
- Strong knowledge of data transformation, preparation, validation, and remediation techniques.
- Familiarity with data warehousing solutions (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Synapse).
- Experience with workflow orchestration (Airflow, Prefect, Luigi).
- Solid understanding of DevOps and CI/CD for data pipelines.
- Skills
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to collaborate effectively with developers, analysts, and business stakeholders.
- Strong ability to document data requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
- Proven leadership and mentoring capabilities to guide and develop team members.
- Ability to work seamlessly across technical and non-technical teams.
- Strong problem-solving mindset with focus on detail, data quality, and scalability.
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and meet tight SLAs.