Senior Data Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to join our Data & Analytics team, responsible for designing, building, testing and maintaining scalable data pipelines and data models on our Databricks lakehouse on Azure, governed through Unity Catalog. You will work in an AI-first team where agentic AI is part of how we design, build, test and operate our data platform every day. As a senior member of the team, you will lead technical design, set engineering standards and mentor other engineers.

YOUR CHALLENGE:

- Design and develop data pipelines in Python (PySpark) on Databricks, applying engineering best practices for performance, reliability and maintainability.

- Ingest and integrate diverse data sources into the lakehouse in batch, following our bronze, silver and gold layering and ensuring data quality and accuracy.

- Help introduce event streaming and real-time ingestion to the platform: design, build and operate streaming pipelines on Databricks from sources such as Kafka, handling late, duplicate and out-of-order events reliably.

- Maintain data models and the data estate codebase, with data governed, secured and documented in Unity Catalog.

- Write automated tests for every change: unit tests for pipeline logic, integration tests against real data, and data quality checks that catch issues before they reach users.

- Set and champion engineering standards across the team: clean, modular code, peer code review, CI/CD, infrastructure as code (Databricks Asset Bundles) and clear documentation.

- Lead the technical design of new pipelines and platform features, review the work of other engineers, and mentor and coach the team.

- Use agentic AI tools (such as Claude Code) daily to build, test, review and troubleshoot, and help design and improve the AI agents and skills that automate our data workflows, with human review built in.

- Monitor and operate our cloud data platform (Databricks on Azure) day to day: track pipelines and jobs, troubleshoot issues and support daily data operations.

- Collaborate with engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders; support ad hoc data analysis requests.

- Drive continuous improvement through training and self-development.

- Any other ad hoc tasks that may be required by the business from time to time.

TO DO IT, YOU WILL NEED:

- A Degree in IT, Computer Science, or related fields.

- Extensive proven experience as a Data Engineer, including ownership of designing and building scalable ETL/ELT processes for batch and real-time data lakes or lakehouses.

- Hands-on experience with Databricks on Azure, including Unity Catalog (catalogs, schemas, permissions and lineage).

- Hands-on experience with event streaming and real-time ingestion: Spark Structured Streaming and event platforms such as Kafka.

- Strong SQL skills; experience with relational databases and complex queries.

- Experience orchestrating pipelines with Databricks Workflows (Jobs) and deploying them with Databricks Asset Bundles; Azure Data Factory experience is an asset.

- Coding proficiency in PySpark and Python.

- A strong testing mindset: experience writing unit and integration tests (e.g. pytest) and data quality checks, and writing code that is designed to be tested.

- Solid software engineering practices: Git, pull requests and code review, CI/CD (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions or equivalent) and documentation.

- Experience leading technical design, reviewing others’ code and mentoring engineers.

- Hands-on experience working with agentic AI: using AI coding agents (such as Claude Code) in daily engineering work, and designing, building or integrating LLM-powered agents that orchestrate data workflows.

- Comfortable delivering in a fast-paced, agile environment.

- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

- Excellent communication and team collaboration.

- Self-motivated with a drive for continuous learning.

Want to help build the future of Catena Media?  Apply now for the opportunity to join our collaborative team!