Senior Data Engineer - Azure Databricks

Salary: Excellent Salary and benefits package.

Take ownership of an established Azure Databricks platform and lead its next stage of evolution.

We’re looking for an experienced Senior Data Engineer – Azure Databricks to join a large, established New Zealand organisation undergoing significant investment in its data capability.

The foundations of the data platform are already in place. Your focus will be on extending, hardening and scaling the environment – introducing new capability, improving engineering practices and strengthening governance as the platform matures.

This is a senior, hands-on role where you’ll combine technical delivery with leadership of a small team of Data Engineers. You’ll set technical direction and engineering standards while working closely with analytics, BI and business stakeholders.

Proven production experience with Azure Databricks is essential.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead the continued evolution of an Azure Databricks lakehouse, including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog and medallion architecture.
• Design and build robust, scalable ETL/ELT pipelines using SQL and Python.
• Extend platform capability across Azure Data Factory, ADLS Gen2, Key Vault and other Azure services.
• Mature CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and DevOps practices.
• Strengthen data governance, quality, lineage, access control and security.
• Improve platform performance, reliability, monitoring and observability.
• Design and maintain data models supporting analytics and reporting.
• Lead, coach and mentor Data Engineers and establish strong engineering standards.
• Partner with analytics, BI and business teams to translate data requirements into effective technical solutions.
• Contribute to the organisation’s broader data strategy and roadmap.

What we’re looking for

You’ll be an experienced Data Engineer who has worked extensively with Azure Databricks in a production environment and is comfortable taking technical ownership of an evolving data platform.

You’ll bring:

• Strong commercial Azure Databricks experience, including Delta Lake and Unity Catalog.
• Strong experience across the Azure data ecosystem, particularly Azure Data Factory, ADLS Gen2 and Azure Key Vault.
• Advanced SQL skills and strong Python capability for data engineering.
• Experience with dimensional and/or medallion data modelling.
• CI/CD experience using Azure DevOps and/or GitHub Actions.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform, Bicep or ARM.
• Experience implementing data governance, quality and access-control frameworks.
• Experience improving or re-architecting an existing data platform for greater scalability, governance and reliability.
• Previous experience leading, coaching or mentoring Data Engineers.
• Strong stakeholder management skills and the ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical audiences.

Experience with Power BI, streaming or near-real-time ingestion technologies such as Event Hubs or Kafka, and relevant Databricks or Microsoft Azure certifications would be advantageous.

Why consider this opportunity?

This is an opportunity to step into an environment where the foundations have already been built but there is still plenty of scope to make your mark.

You’ll have the opportunity to:

• Influence the technical direction of a growing data platform.
• Lead and develop a small engineering team.
• Work on a modern Azure Databricks environment.
• Introduce better engineering, governance and DevOps practices.
• Work closely with senior technical and business stakeholders.
• Help shape the organisation’s longer-term data capability.

The role is Auckland based with a hybrid working model of three days in the office and two days working from home.

Benefits include subsidised medical insurance, enhanced employer retirement contributions, additional leave benefits and dedicated paid learning and development time.

If you’re an experienced Azure Databricks Data Engineer looking for a role combining hands-on engineering, technical ownership and team leadership, we’d like to hear from you.

Apply now or contact JOYN for a confidential discussion.