Lead Data Engineer – Data Products & Lakehouse Architect

Protective Life; Birmingham (AL); On-site; USD 110,000 - 168,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with company matching

Pension plan

ProHealth Rewards

Job summary

Protective is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to set the technical direction for a delivery pod building data products on Voyager, our Databricks lakehouse on Azure. You will lead the design of data products through Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers and own the engineering standards, contracts, and testing for consumer-facing datasets.

This hands-on leadership role requires writing and reviewing production code daily, and collaborating with ML, data architecture, and governance to ensure scalable,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field.
• 6+ years building and operating production data pipelines and consumer-facing data models.
• Strong hands-on Python and SQL, with the credibility to make design calls and still write/review code.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks/Spark-based lakehouse, Delta Lake, MERGE, and performance tuning.
• Deep dimensional modeling experience including grains, keys, SCDs, facts and conformed dimensions.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and ownership of data products.
• Experience with orchestration (Dagster, Databricks Workflows, Airflow), Git, and CI/CD.
• Experience setting observability and SLA/SLO expectations for data products.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of data products end to end across Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers.
• Own dimensional design and where business logic belongs within the data pod.
• Set engineering standards for Python, SQL, dbt, testing, and repository conventions.
• Lead code reviews and ensure pipeline health with tests and asset checks.
• Own the pod’s operational posture, incident handling, backfills, and on-call readiness.
• Collaborate with ML engineering when Gold is training/feature source for models.
• Define and manage data contracts and breaking-change policies with consumers.

Skills

Python

SQL

Databricks

Dimensional modeling

Technical leadership

Data contracts

Orchestration (Dagster/Airflow)

CI/CD

Observability

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering/Info Systems

Tools

Delta Lake

dbt

Azure DevOps

Dagster

Azure Databricks

Job description

Protective is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to set the technical direction for a delivery pod building data products on Voyager, our Databricks lakehouse on Azure. You will lead the design of data products through Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers and own the engineering standards, contracts, and testing for consumer-facing datasets.

This hands-on leadership role requires writing and reviewing production code daily, and collaborating with ML, data architecture, and governance to ensure scalable,