Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer

Join our team to help create and develop the future of live entertainment and sports in Orange County!

Mission: To enrich the lives in our community through shared experiences, welcoming spaces, and responsible actions.

Vision: We will be the social and entertainment center of Orange County – a place where the cultural kaleidoscope of the region converges and connects. Our vibrant, rich collection of experiences will celebrate the diversity of our community.

Values: Be Safe | Do the Right Thing | Be Generous | Include Everyone | Make it Easy | Be Bold

The annual base salary range for this position in California is $140,000 to $180,000 per year. The starting pay for the successful candidate depends on various job-related factors, including but not limited to the candidate's geographic location, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, education/training, internal value, peer equity, external market demands, and organizational considerations.

The Lead Data Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and governing a reliable data warehouse architecture that unifies key business data across ticketing, loyalty, and F&B systems. This role owns critical data engineering standards, identity resolution, Azure environment governance, and production-grade pipeline development while partnering with business and technical stakeholders to deliver trusted data products that support analytics, operations, and decision-making.

Responsibilities

• Design and build a governed data warehouse architecture that unifies ticketing, loyalty, and F&B data into a single trusted source of truth
• Own identity resolution end-to-end, including defining the entity framework, setting coverage standards, and expanding capabilities as new source systems are onboarded
• Govern the Azure data environment, including monitoring, alerting, cost controls, and consolidation into a single reliable warehouse
• Serve as the internal technical counterpart to the implementation partner by auditing the existing platform, evaluating architectural decisions, and driving toward full internal ownership
• Translate complex data architecture decisions for non-technical business partners and collaborate with analytics and operations teams to deliver data products that drive business decisions
• Mentor engineers and help build a culture of technical rigor while remaining hands-on as a builder

Qualifications

• 6–9 years of hands-on data engineering experience designing and building production-grade systems
• Academic background in a quantitative or technical field such as physics, mathematics, computer science, engineering, or a related field
• Production-grade pipeline development experience in Python and advanced SQL, with strong attention to performance, observability, and maintainability
• Production experience with dbt, including project structure, robust test coverage, and development of reliable transformation layers that support downstream reporting and analytics
• Production experience with Airflow or equivalent tools, such as Dagster or Prefect, including DAG design, dependency management, and failure handling at scale
• Deep cloud data warehouse experience; Azure preferred, with strong AWS or GCP experience transferable
• Experience building or enforcing medallion architecture in a production environment
• Experience inheriting or auditing an externally managed platform, including reviewing unfamiliar codebases and independently evaluating architectural decisions
• Experience owning engineering standards, including code review, pipeline governance, and documentation practices
• AI-native mindset, with experience using AI-assisted tools as a productivity multiplier

Education - Bachelor's Degree

Experience Required – 6+ Years

This position is on-site.

Company: OC Sports & Entertainment, LLC

Our Commitment:

We are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and team members without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, parental status, military service, medical condition or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws. We are firm believers that diversity and inclusion among our team members are critical to our success, and we seek to recruit, develop, and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.

Thanks for your interest in becoming part of OCVIBE!