Sr Data Engineer (Data Bricks)
Job Description
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Job Title: Senior Data Engineer (Databricks)
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Primary Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid – 3 days onsite / 2 days remote)
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Position Type: Full-Time, Direct Hire
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Must Be Citizen or Green Card
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OVERVIEW
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A Senior Data Engineer. This is a full-time, direct hire role in Chicago, IL, working a hybrid schedule with a minimum of three days onsite per week. This role exists as part of a multi-year initiative to transform our client's Data & AI function, building a modern data platform that enables speed-to-insight and makes the organization truly data-driven.
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You'll be one of the core builders of a brand-new Azure Databricks platform, designing and delivering the pipelines, transformations, and models that everything else runs on. The environment is greenfield: Databricks is stood up, but no production pipelines exist yet, so you'll help set the standards from day one. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role, not a people management, architecture, AI/LLM, or BI/reporting role. The architecture is defined; your job is to build it well and raise the technical bar of a growing team (expanding to 25–30) that is largely BI-focused today.
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The work carries strong executive sponsorship and enterprise-wide visibility, with the chance to influence engineering practices across the organization. The interview process includes a live technical assessment covering Python, SQL, and practical data pipeline logic.
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WHAT YOU BRING TO THE ROLE. (IDEAL EXPERIENCE)
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- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field
- 6+ years of hands-on data engineering experience, with a track record of owning pipelines end to end: ingestion, validation, transformation, and governance
- Real, hands-on Databricks experience (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP acceptable), including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Databricks SQL, Spark clusters, and Workflows/Jobs
- Strong coding skills in Python, SQL, and Apache Spark that go well beyond basic scripting
- Proven experience designing and building scalable ETL/ELT pipelines, including reusable, metadata-driven pipelines
- Experience with object storage, lakehouse engines, orchestration tools, and streaming or CDC pipelines
- Solid data modeling, schema design, and performance tuning experience
- Working knowledge of Git-based workflows, CI/CD, test automation, and monitoring and alerting
- Strong troubleshooting skills and a solid grasp of engineering fundamentals: scalability, reliability, and maintainability
- The ability to clearly explain what you built, why it mattered, and how it solved a business or platform problem
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Preferred Experience building or migrating a data platform from the ground up
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- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM) and Governance as Code experience
- Multi-cloud background with depth in Azure
- Legacy data warehousing and/or Hadoop experience
- Deep Databricks exposure beyond basic pipelines, such as enterprise-scale work and optimization
- A track record of mentoring and upskilling peers
- Agile delivery experience
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WHAT YOU'LL DO. (SKILLS USED IN THIS POSITION)
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- Lead the design and build of scalable data pipelines and models in Azure Databricks on a brand-new platform with no production code yet
- Own pipelines end to end, from ingesting source systems to transforming and modeling data to producing outputs for downstream analytics, BI, and AI/ML use cases
- Refactor and migrate multiple legacy data warehouses into the centralized Databricks lakehouse
- Work at the code level every day in Python, SQL, and Spark, building pipelines with Databricks Asset Bundles, Spark workflows, and API-driven jobs
- Establish engineering standards for CI/CD (GitHub/Azure DevOps), automated data testing, monitoring, and alerting
- Help shape and enforce standards for data modeling and governance
- Troubleshoot and optimize performance across the platform
- Mentor and coach junior engineers, conduct code reviews, and lead by example in design, coding, and testing practices
- Partner with Data Engineering, BI, AI, Finance, and product owners, and help translate technical work into business impact
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