Data Engineering Lead

Are you an elite Lead or Principal Data Engineer ready to step into leadership, but unwilling to give up hands-on coding?

This is a rare opportunity to join an industry leader in Australia as they embark on a massive digital transformation. You won’t be stuck patching legacy systems; you will be the technical visionary driving a greenfield migration from a legacy SQL environment to a modern, AI-enabled Data Lakehouse.
Reporting to a highly technical Head of Data & AI who values engineering rigour over bureaucracy, you will foster an “automation-first” culture. This is the perfect environment for a builder with consulting DNA or tech-native experience to mentor a small team while delivering a platform that will power the next generation of tech withing the industry.

What you’ll be doing:

• Operating 70% hands-on to design, build, and deploy a modern data Lakehouse (evaluating and implementing Snowflake and/or Databricks).
• Building robust Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and establishing MLOps frameworks from scratch.
• Driving end-to-end delivery from the initial Proof of Concept (POC) through to full production implementation.
• Mentoring, coaching, and elevating a small squad of engineers, shifting the team culture toward DataOps excellence.

What you’ll bring to the team:

• Deep, daily hands-on coding expertise in Python and PySpark.
• Proven experience building cloud-native data platforms and deploying them securely using Terraform (IaaS).
• Solid practical understanding of modern MLOps and CI/CD pipelines.
• A strong mentorship mindset—you know how to elevate the engineers around you.

If you’re a data leader looking to build something meaningful, APPLY NOW or drop me an email on richard@realtimeaustralia.com – I can’t wait to speak with you!