Lead-Data Automation and Excellence

Job Overview

Lead
- Data Automation and Excellence – a senior individual contributor and technical leader responsible for leading a technology squad in the planning, design, build, and operation of high‑quality, scalable, and AI‑ready data assets. The role provides hands‑on technical leadership, drives automation using AI agents for data management, sets engineering standards, and ensures alignment with enterprise architecture, platform patterns, and the SDLC toolchain.

• Solution Architecture & Technical Enablement: drive solution architecture for data across ingestion, curation and consumption layers; guide squad members in problem‑solving complex technical challenges and support implementation of sound, scalable solutions; shape technology standards and frameworks; mentor engineers; lead technical design of data assets using a medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) within a federated data product squad model; recommend improved technical approaches;
  
  drive technical improvements in data curation practices using Change Data Capture (CDC) and event‑driven patterns; design and guide implementation of event‑driven and streaming architectures, including Kafka‑based solutions integrated with batch pipelines.
• Operational Excellence & SDLC: improve operational efficiency through optimization of CI/CD pipelines; promote automation with AI‑driven capabilities across testing, deployment, data quality validation and observability; manage technical debt while balancing delivery commitments.
• AI Enablement & Data Readiness: apply data engineering best practices with AI and GenAI literacy; prompt engineering and AI‑assisted development; LLMs and GenAI concepts; data profiling and automated asset creation; collaborate with architects, platform teams and product owners to ensure AI readiness.
• Additional Duties: partner with Product Owners to refine technical requirements, define acceptance criteria and support backlog shaping; collaborate with other Lead Engineers on standards, cross‑squad dependencies and shared technical challenges; stay current with emerging technologies; support onboarding of new engineers.

• Education:
  
  Bachelor’s Degree in Computing or similar discipline.
• Experience:
  
  7+ years in data engineering, 3–5+ years in a senior or technical lead role; 5+ years with modern layered or medallion architectures; 3+ years hands‑on with Kafka, event‑driven architectures and CDC; 4+ years implementing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines aligned with enterprise SDLC standards; working knowledge of AI and GenAI concepts relevant to data platforms.
• Skills:
  
  strong design, building and operating data pipelines across batch, streaming and near‑real‑time; mentoring and technical leadership; collaboration with product, architecture and platform teams; data quality, lineage, governance and cataloging;
  Agile product development; critical thinking, coaching and stakeholder management.

• Base pay range: $94,000.00 – $.
• Retirement: consolidated retirement plan (pension) and savings plan (401(k)).
• Time Off: vacation (120 hours/year), sick time (40 hours/year, 48 hours in Colorado, 56 hours in Washington), holiday pay (13 days/year), work‑family time (up to 40 hours/year), parental leave (480 hours within one year), bereavement leave (240 hours), caregiver leave (80 hours), volunteer leave (32 hours), military spouse time‑off (80 hours).