What are the responsibilities and job description for the Lead Data Engineer position at Harnham?
Title: Lead Data Engineer
Location: Houston, TX
Compensation: $160,000-$200,000 base 25% bonus
Employment Type: 4 Days on-site
A fast-evolving organization is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to spearhead cloud-native data architecture efforts within a growing enterprise initiative. This is a highly visible technical leadership role, responsible for designing and scaling modern data platforms based on Databricks Lakehouse and Medallion Architecture principles.
You’ll serve as the technical authority across cloud data engineering practices, guide the transition away from legacy platforms, and lead a Data Management Community of Practice (CoP) to drive innovation across engineering and business teams.
What You’ll Do
- Architect and implement modern, scalable cloud-based data pipelines across Bronze, Silver, and Gold lakehouse layers
- Lead efforts in Databricks Lakehouse environments and design end-to-end ingestion, transformation, and optimization workflows
- Build robust integration pipelines using tools such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Airflow, Fivetran, and native AWS services
- Act as the primary facilitator of the data engineering CoP, promoting best practices, technical growth, and standards adoption
- Collaborate cross-functionally with data science, analytics, and business stakeholders to align infrastructure to business goals
- Optimize data governance, lineage, security, and quality in a high-scale, real-time environment
- Provide architectural oversight, troubleshoot performance issues, and guide adoption of modern data tools and frameworks
What You Bring
- 5 years of experience in data engineering, with leadership roles in cloud-native or lakehouse environments
- Strong track record with Databricks Lakehouse, including Medallion layer implementation
- Advanced proficiency in AWS cloud services (S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda) and big data tooling (Apache Spark, Kafka, Hadoop)
- Hands-on development using Python, SQL, and/or Scala for production-grade pipelines
- Familiarity with CI/CD workflows, modern DevOps for data, and structured data modeling
- Experience leading or facilitating technical communities of practice is highly preferred
- Excellent communication skills with strong executive presence
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar
- Certifications in Databricks, AWS, or DAMA CDMP are a plus
Salary : $160,000 - $200,000
