Lead Snowflake Data Engineer

Snowflake Cortex AI PySpark ELT Dimensional modeling Query optimization Clustering keys Micro-partitioning Warehouse scaling Data marts Distributed processing Data governance Data security AWS Client-facing delivery Python SQL React

We are seeking a senior Lead Data Engineer for a fully onsite contract engagement in New York, NY with a global consulting firm serving large financial services and enterprise clients. This role owns the end-to-end design, development, and delivery of production-grade data platforms in Snowflake, from ingestion through transformation, modeling, and consumption. The engineer will architect scalable ELT pipelines, design dimensional models and data marts, build backend data services in Python and PySpark, and optimize performance across large-scale cloud data workloads.

The role requires deep hands-on expertise with Snowflake, including query tuning, clustering strategy, warehouse scaling, micro-partitioning, and cost-performance tradeoff decisions, along with hands-on experience integrating Snowflake Cortex AI for advanced analytics and intelligent data products. This person will also enforce data governance, security, and compliance standards, partner with analytics, business, and engineering stakeholders, and operate in a client-facing capacity where they must clearly explain and defend architecture decisions.

AWS experience is preferred, and working knowledge of React is helpful for collaboration on user-facing data products. This is a senior technical leadership role with meaningful architectural ownership, active coding responsibility, and mentorship of engineering teams.