Lead Data Engineer
Oaklan, CA Remote
12 months contract
Open to all US candidates that can work 8 - 5pm PST

• The Data Engineering Platform Lead is responsible for the overall design, operation, and evolution of enterprise data platforms supporting analytics, integration, and business intelligence.
• This role owns the data engineering platform stackincluding Snowflake, Informatica, dbt, AWS, and CI/CD toolingand serves as the primary interface between data engineering teams and partner organizations such as Cyber Security, Cloud Infrastructure, DevOps, and Enterprise Architecture.
• This is a hands-on technical leadership role with strong platform management and communication responsibilities, ensuring platforms are secure, scalable, cost?effective, and aligned with enterprise standards.

Responsibilities:
Platform Ownership & Strategy

• Own the end?to?end data engineering platform, including data storage, ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and DevOps tooling.
• Define and maintain platform standards, reference architectures, and best practices for:
• Data ingestion (e.g., Informatica)
• Data transformation and modeling (dbt)
• Data warehousing (Snowflake)
• Drive platform roadmaps and adoption of modern data engineering patterns.
• Evaluate and recommend platform enhancements, tooling upgrades, and new capabilities.
• Cross Functional Collaboration

Act as the primary point of contact with:

• Cyber Security (data protection, access controls, audits)
• Cloud Infrastructure (AWS services, scalability, resiliency)
• DevOps (CI/CD, environment management, automation)
• Enterprise Architecture and Data Governance teams
• Translate data engineering needs into platform and infrastructure requirements and ensure alignment across teams.

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical leadership and guidance to data engineers using the platform.
• Establish and enforce dbt standards, including
• Project structure and layering
• Naming conventions and documentation
• Testing, freshness, and data quality practices
• Guide solution designs to ensure efficient, secure, and scalable use of Snowflake and dbt.
• Promote software engineering and DevOps best practices for analytics engineering.

DevOps & Automation

• Lead implementation of CI/CD pipelines for data platforms, including dbt deployments.
• Integrate Git?based workflows, automated testing, and controlled promotion across environments.
• Partner with DevOps teams to improve reliability, repeatability, and release confidence.

Operational Excellence

• Ensure platform reliability, performance, and cost optimization.
• Define monitoring, alerting, and support models for platform services.
• Support compliance, audit, and risk remediation activities.
• Maintain platform documentation, runbooks, and onboarding materials.

Required Technical Skills

• Strong experience managing and operating enterprise data platforms, including:
• Snowflake (architecture, administration, performance, security)
• Informatica (PowerCenter and/or Informatica Cloud) dbt (core concepts, modeling patterns, tests, documentation, environments)
• AWS (foundational services supporting data platforms)
• Hands?on experience with DevOps and CI/CD, including:
• Git / GitHub (branching and version control)
• Jenkins (or equivalent CI/CD tools)
• Strong understanding of:
• Data modeling and transformation best practices
• Cloud security and access controls
• Platform scalability, reliability, and cost management

Communication & Leadership Skills

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Proven ability to work across multiple teams with differing priorities.
• Comfortable leading design reviews, architecture discussions, and platform governance forums.
• Ability to influence without direct authority and drive adoption of standards.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in data engineering or data platform engineering.
• 3+ years in a technical lead, platform lead, or principal?level role.
• Experience in large enterprise or regulated environments preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting federated development teams using shared dbt and Snowflake platforms.
• Familiarity with data governance, metadata management, and analytics catalogs.
• Experience defining operating and support models for shared platforms.

 
 
At SPECTRAFORCE, we are committed to maintaining a workplace that ensures fair compensation and wage transparency in adherence with all applicable state and local laws. This position’s starting pay is: $ 98.41/daily.