Senior Data Engineer - Data Platform & Engineering

What you’ll be doing

As a Senior Data Engineer for Data Platform Engineering, you'll own a significant domain of our data platform and be a technical anchor for the wider team.

• Own the reliability, quality, and evolution of a significant portion of our data platform, built on Snowflake, dbt Cloud, RabbitMQ, Postgres, and GitHub Actions.
• Lead performance tuning and cost optimisation across our Snowflake environment - query profiling, micro-partition analysis, clustering strategy, and warehouse configuration.
• Design model architecture in dbt Cloud, enforce testing standards, and guide the team on incremental strategy and modelling best practice.
• Architect scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines and define standards for error handling, observability, and pipeline design.
• Act as a technical representative for DPE with product, commercial, and analytics stakeholders, translating business requirements into data engineering solutions.
• Own significant platform domains and act as the escalation point for incidents within them - driving root cause analysis and systemic reliability improvements.
• Actively develop the capability of the wider team through mentoring, code review, and knowledge sharing, particularly in high-risk or concentrated-expertise areas.
• Evaluate and recommend AI tooling for the team, with a focus on responsible use, reliability, and auditability of AI-augmented pipelines.

What we’re looking for

• Deep expertise in SQL and Snowflake - clustering, pruning, warehouse sizing, result caching, Snowpipe, Streams, and Tasks.
• Expert-level dbt Cloud experience - model architecture, testing standards, incremental strategies, and (ideally) exposure to MetricFlow or semantic layers.
• Strong Python engineering practices - production-grade, testable, maintainable code for pipeline development.
• Proven experience with event-driven and messaging architecture (RabbitMQ or equivalent) - exchange types, routing, dead-letter queues, and consumer/producer design.
• Solid Postgres experience in a production pipeline context - indexing, query optimisation, MVCC, and troubleshooting replication or performance issues.
• Working proficiency in .NET / C# is a plus - comfortable reading, triaging, and maintaining existing pipeline code without needing to be a full-time.NET developer.
• Strong grasp of data governance, privacy, and security practices, and a track record of building governance into pipelines from the start.
• Comfortable using AI coding assistants across the full development lifecycle, with a critical eye on output quality, data privacy, and cost.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, aligned with our values: (customer-obsessed, curious, connected).

We know not everyone will meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If you’re excited about the role and believe you can make a difference, we’d love to hear from you.

A few other things we want you to know...

• As an equal opportunity employer, carsales welcomes applications from individuals of all backgrounds, identities, abilities, and life experiences. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and supported.
• If you have a disability or require adjustments to participate fully in the recruitment process, please let us know - we’re here to support you.
• We understand the importance of work-life balance and offer flexible working arrangements, including part-time options. If you’d like to explore this, just ask during the process.
• We’re also a proud Circle Back Initiative employer, which means we commit to responding to every applicant.
• Successful candidates joining the carsales team will need to complete a National Police Record check and must have full-time Australian working rights.

So come and join our team - because every role is a big role in our plans to go big.