Sr. Data Platform Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Job Location – Troy, NY (Hybrid - 3 Days Onsite Per Week)

Type - Contract (18 Months)

Pay Rate – $70.00 - $78.00 Per Hour (W2 Only)

The Central Technology and Services team (CTS) provides data analytics services that support game teams and analysts across the organization. As players perform actions in-game, our platform collects telemetry in real-time. The data collected provides insights for guiding game development, marketing, and monetization.

The Data Platform Engineer / DBA manages our database and data platform fleet, maintaining secure, optimized, and highly available databases, data warehouses, and lakehouses. Clien’ts stack is evolving: Redshift remains a core platform, and they are actively expanding into Databricks and open table format (Apache Iceberg on S3). The Data Platform Engineer / DBA works closely with engineering and analytics teams to design, implement, and maintain these systems.

Responsibilities

• Operate Redshift clusters, Databricks workspaces, RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL instances, and supporting AWS infrastructure
• Perform user/security tasks across platforms: Redshift user/group management, Databricks Unity Catalog access controls, IAM Roles/Policies, RDS parameter and access management
• Design and maintain open table format data lakes using Apache Iceberg on S3, including compaction, snapshot management, partition strategies, and schema evolution
• Profile production workloads and develop strategies to run optimized clusters and workspaces with scale and efficiency
• Provide architecture guidance and support to technical leads; help develop code and SQL for data assets, identify performance tuning opportunities, and work with developers to improve production systems
• Contribute to and maintain automation scripts and internal tooling with production-quality code standards (unit tests, peer review, documentation, Git-based workflows)
• Develop monitoring and recovery automation to identify and resolve issues to meet our high SLA
• Research new technologies and develop proofs of concept; propose technical improvements and new capabilities

Must Have Skills / Requirements

• 3+ years of experience with AWS data services: Redshift, RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, S3, EC2, Athena, Glue, Lake Formation
• 2+ years of experience with Databricks: workspace administration, Unity Catalog, cluster management, Spark SQL, Delta Live Tables or similar
• 2+ years of experience with PostgreSQL or Aurora PostgreSQL: query tuning, replication concepts, pg_stat views, parameter groups
• 2+ years of experience with AWS Security: IAM (Users, Groups, Roles, Policies, Instance Profiles), Redshift/RDS security, S3 bucket policies

Nice to Have Skills / Preferred Requirements

• PySpark for data pipeline development
• AWS Glue with Iceberg or Delta Lake integration
• Snowflake administration
• Terraform or AWS CDK for infrastructure as code
• DynamoDB experience
• Feature Store

Soft Skills:

• Ability to read, understand, debug, and extend complex Python codebases; comfort navigating large repositories with multiple modules and abstractions
• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills
• Ability to lead projects, prioritize, and multitask
• Deadline and detail-oriented
• Part of on-call rotation

Technology Requirements:

• Experience with Apache Iceberg on S3: partition management, compaction, snapshot management, schema evolution
• Proficiency in Python for automation and shared tooling: object-oriented design, writing maintainable and testable code, participating in code review, and contributing to a shared Git-based codebase
• Experience automating database and platform operations using Python, Jenkins, Airflow, Datadog and Git