Senior / Lead Data Engineer

Location: Melbourne or Sydney preferred

Other Australian locations considered

We are partnering with a growing technology consultancy seeking a Senior or Lead Data Engineer with strong experience across data engineering, cloud platforms, software development and customer-facing consulting.

This is not simply a heads-down data engineering position. You will work directly with technical teams, business stakeholders and customers to understand complex problems, design effective solutions and deliver production-grade data platforms.

The Role

You will take ownership of the design and delivery of modern cloud data platforms, primarily within AWS environments. Your responsibilities will include:

- Data platform architecture and engineering
- Data pipelines, modelling and transformation
- Cloud infrastructure and security
- DevOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code
- Data warehousing, lakehouse and analytics platforms
- Technical discovery and solution design
- Customer and stakeholder consulting

At Lead level, you will also help set engineering standards, mentor engineers, review architecture and lead technical delivery across customer projects.

You will ideally bring:

- Strong commercial experience as a Senior, Lead or Principal Data Engineer
- A software engineering background before moving into data engineering
- Strong AWS experience
- Deep experience with Databricks, Snowflake or ClickHouse
- Strong Python and SQL skills
- Experience building scalable data pipelines and platforms
- Strong knowledge of data modelling, ETL/ELT and distributed systems
- Experience with CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code
- Exposure to security, governance, IAM and access controls




- Experience delivering production-grade systems, not purely reporting or BI solutions

Consulting Experience

We are particularly interested in engineers who have worked in consulting, professional services or customer-facing environments.

You should be comfortable

- Working directly with customers and senior stakeholders
- Running discovery sessions and technical workshops
- Understanding business problems before recommending a solution
- Translating complex technical concepts into explicit business language
- Challenging requirements when a stronger approach is available
- Defining solution architecture and delivery plans
- Working across multiple customers and technical environments
- Bridging the gap between engineering teams and business stakeholders

You do not need to be a salesperson, but you do need to be someone customers trust in the room.

Technical Environment

Experience across several of the following will be highly regarded:

- AWS
- Databricks, Snowflake or ClickHouse
- Python, SQL and Spark
- Kafka or other streaming technologies
- Docker and Kubernetes
- Terraform
- GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar
- Data lakes and lakehouse architectures
- APIs and microservices
- IAM and cloud security
- Data governance and observability

What Will Make You Stand Out The ideal combination is:

Software Engineering + Data Engineering + AWS + Consulting

We are looking for someone who understands how modern software, infrastructure, security and data platforms fit together and can confidently explain that to a customer.

Melbourne or Sydney is preferred, although strong candidates elsewhere in Australia will also be considered.

📌 Lead Data Engineer (Sydney)
🏢 FIRESOFT People
📍 Sydney