Live opening · Posted 4 days ago
The key details from the original listing.
Live timing from JobBeeper.
Description supplied by the original job listing.
Strategic Mandate
As the Data Platform Lead, you are the technical owner and steward of Nielsen's Databricks Lakehouse for Corporate function. You will drive the strategy, architecture, and operational maturity of our Databricks ecosystem end to end — from workspace and Unity Catalog design to cost governance and platform reliability. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and data governance: you will define the guardrails, standards, and reusable patterns that let every engineering and analytics team build confidently on a secure, scalable, and cost-efficient foundation. You will act as the "Platform Authority" for Databricks, ensuring the lakehouse scales with the business while remaining governed, observable, and audit-ready. Critically, you will build an AI-driven data platform — architecting AI-native capabilities (feature stores, vector search, GenAI-ready pipelines) directly into the platform, while also using AI-assisted and agentic engineering practices to build, manage, and scale the platform itself faster and more reliably
Core Goals & Responsibilities
Lakehouse Platform Ownership: Own the end-to-end architecture of the Databricks Lakehouse, including workspace topology, cluster policies, compute strategy (job clusters, SQL warehouses, serverless), and multi-cloud deployment patterns (AWS/Azure/GCP).
Unity Catalog & Governance: Design and enforce the global data governance model — catalogs, schemas, access controls, lineage, and audit logging — via Unity Catalog, ensuring consistent metadata management and fine-grained access across business units.
Data Engineering Standards: Define and enforce best practices for Delta Lake table design, Delta Live Tables (DLT) pipelines, medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold), and performance optimization (Z-ordering, liquid clustering, partitioning, file compaction).
Platform Reliability & Automation: Partner with CloudOps and DevOps to industrialize the platform through Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/Databricks Asset Bundles), CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring, targeting 99.99% platform availability.
FinOps & Cost Governance: Own cost transparency and optimization across the Databricks estate — cluster right-sizing, workload isolation, chargeback/showback models, and proactive budget alerting — bringing "Strategic Foresight" to cloud spend.
Cross-Functional Enablement: Work directly with Data Engineering, Analytics, Data Science, and business stakeholders (Finance, HR, Product) to translate requirements into platform capabilities and self-service patterns.
Governed AI Enablement: Own the governed rollout of AI use cases and native AI features (e.g., Databricks Genie, AI/BI Dashboards, Mosaic AI) on the platform. You hold the keys to unlocking GenAI and natural-language analytics for the business, safely, within Unity Catalog's governance and access-control boundaries.
Community & Mentorship: Build and lead a community of practice for Databricks developers across the organization — publishing standards, running enablement sessions, and unblocking delivery friction for engineering teams
Employment type
Full-time
Work arrangement
Hybrid
Recently tracked roles with full details and direct application links.