Senior Data Platform Engineer

Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq ARWR) is a commercial stage biopharmaceutical company that develops medicines that treat intractable diseases by silencing the genes that cause them. Using a broad portfolio of RNA chemistries and efficient modes of delivery, Arrowhead therapies trigger the RNA interference mechanism to induce rapid, deep, and durable knockdown of target genes. RNA interference, or RNAi, is a mechanism present in living cells that inhibits the expression of a specific gene, thereby affecting the production of a specific protein. Arrowhead’s RNAi-based therapeutics leverage this natural pathway of gene silencing.
Arrowhead is focused on developing innovative drugs for diseases with a genetic basis, typically characterized by the overproduction of one or more proteins that are involved with disease. The depth and versatility of our RNAi technologies enables us to potentially address conditions in virtually any therapeutic area and pursue disease targets that are not otherwise addressable by small molecules and biologics. Arrowhead is leading the field in bringing the promise of RNAi to address diseases outside of the liver, and our clinical pipeline includes disease targets in the liver and lung with a promising pipeline of preclinical candidates.
Arrowhead’s corporate headquarters is in Pasadena, CA with research and development teams in Madison, WI & San Diego, CA, and a state of the art manufacturing facility in Verona, WI. Our employees are nimble, science-driven innovators who are collaborating to bring new therapies to patients in need.
The Position
The Senior Data Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and managing the organization's Databricks environments, with end-to-end ownership of the data platform's infrastructure, security, and performance. This role leads the ingestion of data from internal systems and external third-party providers into the lakehouse, partners with business and analytics stakeholders to build and support Genie dashboards, and manages the Databricks platform (workspaces, clusters, Unity Catalog, jobs) as infrastructure-as-code using Terraform. The ideal candidate has hands-on experience administering Databricks in production, writing Terraform for infrastructure changes, and building data pipelines that hold up at enterprise scale.
Responsibilities
Design, build, and manage Databricks environments (workspaces, clusters, Unity Catalog, SQL warehouses) supporting enterprise analytics and data science workloads
Develop and maintain Terraform modules and pipelines to provision, configure, and version-control all Databricks infrastructure and related cloud resources
Design and build data ingestion pipelines to bring in data from internal systems and external third-party data providers (APIs, SFTP, batch files, streaming sources) into the lakehouse.
Architect and maintain medallion (bronze/silver/gold) data layers using Delta Lake, ensuring data quality, lineage, and governance via Unity Catalog
Partner with business and analytics end users to design, build, and support Genie dashboards and enable self-service, natural-language data exploration
Implement platform security, access controls, and partner with data stewards.
Work with data engineers, analysts, data scientists, AI engineers, and cloud DevOps engineers to build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, automated tests, and Terraform infrastructure-as-code for the data platform
Document platform architecture, ingestion pipelines, and operational runbooks
Assist AI engineers by building and maintaining MCP (Model Context Protocol) connectors and other data/tool integrations that power agentic workflows
Requirements
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
5+ years of experience in data engineering or platform engineering roles, including extensive hands-on experience administering and building on Databricks (clusters, jobs, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, SQL warehouses)
Demonstrated experience managing Databricks infrastructure as code using Terraform
Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for building and optimizing data pipelines
Experience designing and building data ingestion pipelines from diverse internal and external data sources (APIs, SFTP, third-party vendor feeds, streaming)
Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure ) and associated data/storage services
Experience supporting business intelligence or natural-language dashboarding tools (e.g., Databricks Genie )
Experience implementing data governance, security, and access controls in Databricks (e.g., Unity Catalog permissions, row/column-level security, service principals, secrets management)
Ability to explain pipeline and dashboard design decisions to non-technical stakeholders, e.g., when scoping Genie dashboard requirements with business users
Preferred
Databricks certifications (e.g., Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional, Databricks Certified Associate/Professional Platform Administrator)
Experience with Databricks Genie and building natural-language / self-service analytics experiences for business users
Experience integrating data from external data providers or vendor APIs at enterprise scale
Familiarity with CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI) for automated deployment of Terraform-managed infrastructure
Experience with data orchestration tools (e.g., Databricks Workflows, Airflow, dbt)
Experience building and supporting agentic workloads on Databricks, including managing model/tool access and governance via the Unity Catalog AI Gateway
Expertise in pharma or pharma-related data (e.g., clinical, R&D, regulatory, or commercial pharma data) and the compliance considerations that come with it
Wisconsin pay range
$155,000—$175,000 USD
California pay range
$175,000—$190,000 USD
Arrowhead provides competitive salaries and an excellent benefit package.
Candidates must have current, valid authorization to work in the country where this role is located.
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