Lead Data Engineer (Hands-On)

Location: Cary, NC — On-site / Hybrid Employment Type: Full-Time
Experience Required: 12–18 years
Eligibility: U.S. Citizens only
About the Engagement
This role supports the development of a centralized, AI-first enterprise Data Hub for a global insurance and financial services organization, built on Azure Databricks .
The platform ingests 150+ inbound data feeds , distributes data to 35+ downstream systems , and follows a modern medallion architecture (Bronze / Silver / Gold) .
AI capabilities are embedded throughout the platform from day one, including ingestion, canonical mapping, data quality, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and business-user access.
This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role . The Lead Data Engineer will own the end-to-end technical design of both the data and AI layers, establish reference implementations for the engineering team, and continue to write and review production-grade Python, Scala, and PySpark code every week .
Candidates who have not written or reviewed production code within the past year will not be considered.
Key Responsibilities
Data Platform Architecture & Engineering

• Own the enterprise lakehouse architecture, including:
  
  • Bronze / Silver / Gold data contracts
    
  • ADLS Gen2 zone design
    
  • Delta Lake table architecture
    
  • Partitioning strategies
    
  • Schema evolution
    
  • Retention policies
    
• Design and implement scalable, production-grade data engineering patterns for enterprise workloads.
  

Ingestion & Streaming Frameworks

• Build metadata-driven and parameterized ingestion frameworks supporting:
  
  • Batch files
    
  • Database extracts
    
  • CDC feeds
    
  • Real-time and streaming workloads
    
• Work extensively with:
  
  • Azure Event Hubs
    
  • Kafka
    
  • Spark Structured Streaming
    

Hands-On Engineering Leadership

• Develop canonical PySpark and Scala Spark implementations.
  
• Establish engineering, coding, and automated testing standards.
  
• Conduct code and pull-request reviews.
  
• Troubleshoot production incidents and Spark workload failures.
  
• Optimize Spark clusters, workloads, and associated cloud costs.
  
• Define and enforce engineering guardrails for performance, scalability, and reliability.
  

CI/CD, Infrastructure & Observability

• Implement CI/CD pipelines for Databricks and Azure Data Factory using:
  
  • Azure DevOps
    
  • Databricks Asset Bundles
    
  • Terraform
    
• Establish observability using:
  
  • Azure Monitor
    
  • Log Analytics
    
• Drive automated testing and repeatable deployment practices across environments.
  

AI-Augmented Data Engineering

• Design AI-assisted ingestion and canonical mapping solutions.
  
• Build capabilities for:
  
  • Automated bridge-document generation
    
  • DML generation
    
  • Canonical table-definition generation
    
  • AI-assisted source-to-canonical mapping
    
• Implement appropriate human-review and approval gates for AI-generated mappings and transformations.
  

AI-Driven Data Quality & Reconciliation

• Build AI/ML-based solutions for:
  
  • Data drift detection
    
  • Schema drift detection
    
  • Volume anomaly detection
    
  • Reconciliation failures
    
  • Automated reconciliation
    
• Develop privacy-preserving synthetic test-data approaches.
  

Semantic Layer & Generative AI

• Help design the enterprise semantic layer and knowledge graph.
  
• Build GPT-powered conversational data-access capabilities, including:
  
  • Text-to-SQL
    
  • Semantic-layer retrieval
    
  • RAG-based access patterns
    
• Enforce row-level and column-level security within AI-powered data-access solutions.
  

Governance & Technical Leadership

• Implement governance using Databricks Unity Catalog , including:
  
  • Lineage
    
  • Access control
    
  • PII standards
    
  • Data discovery and governance
    
• Participate in and lead:
  
  • Architecture Review Boards
    
  • AI governance forums
    
  • Design reviews
    
• Mentor engineers and establish strong technical documentation standards.
  
• Present and defend architecture decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  

Must-Have Skills & Experience
Core Data Engineering

• 12–18 years of total experience in data engineering, data architecture, or enterprise data-platform delivery.
  
• Proven experience delivering enterprise-scale medallion / lakehouse architectures .
  
• Expert-level hands-on experience with:
  
  • Python
    
  • Scala
    
  • PySpark
    
• Strong ability to build modular, well-tested, production-grade data solutions.
  
• Deep experience troubleshooting and tuning Spark workloads.
  
• Experience optimizing large-scale batch and streaming pipelines using Delta Lake .
  

SQL & Data Modeling

• Strong SQL expertise.
  
• Strong experience with:
  
  • Dimensional data modeling
    
  • Normalized data modeling
    
  • Schema design
    
  • Data contracts
    

Databricks
Strong hands-on experience with:

• Delta Lake
  
• Unity Catalog
  
• Databricks Jobs & Workflows
  
• Cluster and pool management
  
• Performance tuning
  
• Databricks Model Serving
  

Microsoft Azure Data Stack
Strong experience with:

• ADLS Gen2
  
• Zone architecture
  
• ACLs
  
• Lifecycle management
  
• Azure Data Factory
  
• Parameterized pipelines
  
• Metadata-driven ingestion frameworks
  
• Azure Event Hubs
  

Generative AI / LLM Engineering

• Minimum 3+ years of experience designing and deploying LLM-based systems in production .
  
• Strong hands-on experience with:
  
  • RAG pipelines
    
  • Agentic / tool-calling workflows
    
  • Chunking strategies
    
  • Embedding strategies
    
  • Vector retrieval
    
  • Hybrid retrieval
    
  • Prompt engineering
    
• Experience with at least one of:
  
  • LangChain
    
  • LlamaIndex
    
  • LangGraph
    
• Experience with at least one production AI stack:
  
  • Azure OpenAI
    
  • OpenAI
    
  • Databricks Model Serving
    

LLM Evaluation & Quality
Experience establishing disciplined evaluation processes, including:

• Golden datasets
  
• Regression suites
  
• Accuracy measurement
  
• Hallucination tracking
  
• Human-in-the-loop feedback
  

Metadata & Governance
Strong experience building or working with metadata-driven frameworks involving:

• Schema inference
  
• Data profiling
  
• Lineage
  
• Data catalogs
  

Azure Security
Strong understanding of:

• Microsoft Entra ID
  
• Managed identities
  
• RBAC
  
• POSIX ACLs
  
• Azure Key Vault
  
• Private endpoints
  
• PII handling and data-security standards
  

DevOps & Infrastructure as Code
Hands-on experience with:

• Azure DevOps
  
• Terraform
  
• Databricks Asset Bundles
  
• Automated testing for data pipelines
  

Communication

• Strong technical writing skills.
  
• Ability to communicate complex architecture decisions clearly.
  
• Ability to present and defend technical designs to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.
  

Strongly Preferred
Experience with any of the following is highly desirable:

• Knowledge graphs and ontologies
  
  • RDF / SPARQL
    
  • Neo4j
    
  • Graph modeling over a lakehouse
    
• Enterprise-scale text-to-SQL solutions
  
• Semantic-layer-backed natural-language query platforms
  
• ML-based anomaly detection for:
  
  • Time-series data
    
  • Financial transactions
    
• Financial services or insurance domain experience, particularly:
  
  • Finance close
    
  • General Ledger
    
  • Subledger
    
  • Reconciliation
    
  • Actuarial data
    
• LLMOps / MLOps, including:
  
  • Model versioning
    
  • Prompt versioning
    
  • Cost governance
    
  • Observability
    
• Certifications such as:
  
  • Databricks Data Engineer Professional
    
  • Microsoft Azure DP-203
    
  • Microsoft Fabric DP-700
    
  • AZ-305
    
• Experience with:
  
  • dbt
    
  • Great Expectations or similar data-quality platforms
    
  • Workday
    
  • Workday Prism
    
  • Workday Accounting Center
    

Submission Requirements
Please include the following information:

• Updated resume
  
• Full Name
  
• Current Location
  
• Contact Number
  
• Email Address
  
• Work Authorization: U.S. Citizen
  
• LinkedIn Profile
  
• Availability to Start
  
• Interview Availability for the next 3 days
  

We are looking for a true hands-on Lead Data Engineer who can combine enterprise architecture ownership with day-to-day production engineering. Candidates should be equally comfortable designing the target architecture, reviewing technical decisions, troubleshooting production workloads, and writing production code.
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