Senior Data Platform Engineer

Xcel Energy (NASDAQ: XEL) is a leading energy provider and Fortune 500 company, dedicated to serving millions of electricity and natural gas customers across eight states:
Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico and Texas. We make energy work better for our customers, helping them thrive every day. That means always raising the bar - delivering better service and providing more reliable, resilient, and sustainable energy. Xcel Energy is a place where you’ll have opportunities to grow, expand your skills, and help lead the clean energy transition.

We offer meaningful rewards, recognition, and support to help you build your career and make an impact - both on the job and beyond. Most importantly, it means you’ll be joining a company that knows employees are the driving force behind its success and is committed to helping you be your best.

Xcel Energy supports a hybrid work model to enable collaboration and flexibility. Many roles are expected to work onsite three days per week (Tuesday–Thursday); however, work location expectations vary based on role, team, and business needs.

Position Summary This senior Data Platform Engineer is responsible for the design, administration, security, governance, and support of Xcel Energy's enterprise Databricks Lakehouse Platform across AWS and GCP. This role provides technical leadership for cloud-based data platform services, including platform operations, Unity Catalog, identity and access management, automation, monitoring, disaster recovery, and cost optimization. Working across data engineering, infrastructure, architecture, security, and business teams, the engineer ensures the platform is scalable, reliable, secure, and capable of supporting enterprise analytics, reporting, and AI/ML initiatives.

Essential Responsibilities Solution Delivery:
Lead and support solution lifecycle technical activities. Ensure solutions are designed for great user experience and operational performance. Lead design, ensuring Enterprise Architecture, Security, Audit, Operations and Compliance aspects are continuously integrated into solutions. Provide input to cost and schedule estimation. Responsible for overall integrity of system design and operation.

Relationship Management:
Conduct peer reviews and approve system changes and technical solution design. Coach and mentor less experience team members. Partner cross-organizationally to drive minimal costs on optimal solutions. Provide in-depth technical information to stakeholders as needed.

Strategy & Planning:
Innovate through usage of industry emerging capabilities and evolving customer needs. Provide input to strategic roadmap and technical dependencies. Subject Matter Expertise:
Continuously stay current on, and apply, technical industry knowledge pertaining to the respective domain

Operations:
Review solution performance and continually assess health of systems. Track and drive awareness to operational and technical debt risks. Provide escalated support to incident and problem management with vendors and internal teams. Utilize analytics to improve availability, reliability, efficiency, and capacity.

Minimum Requirements Ten years of related functional experience.

Bachelor's degree in Technology, Science, Business or related field, or 4 years of experience equivalent to the position. Excellent communication skills, effective with varying organizational levels and skill set, and able to translate between technical and non-technical concepts. Excellent Relationship Management and collaboration skills, with a track record of working as one team cross-organizationally to drive inovation and business results.

Expertise managing the lifecycle of technical solutions.

Deep Subject…