Senior Data Engineer

Salary: Competitive daily rate

We’re seeking an experienced Senior Data Engineer to join a key government engagement, designing and delivering production-ready data pipelines and data products that support analytics, machine learning and AI initiatives.
This is an opportunity to apply your expertise across AWS, Python, SQL and modern data engineering practices while working closely with data scientists, machine learning engineers and multidisciplinary technology teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, test and maintain scalable data pipelines using AWS services.
• Develop curated, reusable and well-documented datasets and data products.
• Collaborate with data scientists and ML engineers to deliver data preparation, feature engineering and model input/output pipelines.
• Translate business requirements into technical designs, delivery estimates and acceptance criteria.
• Implement data quality controls, metadata, lineage, monitoring and alerting.
• Optimise Python, SQL and cloud workloads for performance, reliability and cost efficiency.
• Apply DevOps practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, version control and infrastructure-as-code.
• Maintain technical documentation, data mappings, interface specifications and operational runbooks.
• Work closely with architecture, cyber security, privacy, platform and delivery teams to ensure governance and operational requirements are met.

You will bring:

• Demonstrated experience building production data pipelines and data products on AWS, using services such as S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, EMR, Kinesis or Step Functions.
• Strong knowledge of ETL/ELT, data modelling, pipeline orchestration, data quality testing, metadata and lineage.
• Advanced Python and SQL skills, including writing maintainable, testable code and optimising complex queries.
• Experience with Git, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code using Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
• Experience delivering cloud-based data solutions in containerised environments.
• A sound understanding of cloud security, access controls, secrets management and operational monitoring.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate across technical and business teams.

Australian citizenship is mandatory. An existing NV1 clearance is desirable.

Interested? If you have strong AWS data engineering experience and enjoy building reliable data solutions that enable analytics and AI, we’d like to hear from you.


Peoplebank and Leaders IT are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone belongs. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences. If you need adjustments to the recruitment process due to your circumstances, please let us know—we’re here to support you.