Lead Data Engineer, Consumer

Versant Media is seeking a hands-on Lead Data Engineer to guide end-to-end data product engineering, delivering trusted Silver-layer datasets from source systems into the enterprise data platform. This role combines technical leadership with delivery accountability across ingestion, transformation, governance, and team execution.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead delivery of source-to-Silver data products.
• Lead and develop a distributed/offshore team of Data Engineers responsible for delivery from source ingestion through curated Silver-layer data products.
• Translate product roadmaps and requirements into engineering plans, including milestones, estimates, dependencies, and delivery commitments.
• Design and oversee ingestion, transformation, standardization, orchestration, and publication of data from operational, SaaS, file, streaming, API, and partner sources.
• Ensure Silver-layer data products are validated, standardized, documented, reusable, performant, secure, and ready for Gold-layer analytics and AI consumption.
• Establish repeatable patterns for batch, incremental, change-data-capture, and event-driven processing.
• Build scalable engineering foundations through reusable frameworks, templates, libraries, and pipeline patterns that reduce repeated effort across products and domains.
• Apply modern engineering practices, including source control, peer review, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, release management, and incident remediation.
• Define and maintain standards for naming, partitioning, schema evolution, error handling, replay/recovery, performance, cost management, and documentation.
• Partner with the Data Platform team to use approved workspace, compute, storage, security, and deployment patterns.
• Identify technical debt and lead pragmatic improvements to increase delivery speed, reliability, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with Data Modelers on canonical entities, conformed dimensions, data contracts, source-to-target mappings, and enterprise modeling standards.
• Partner with Product Managers and domain leaders to clarify outcomes, source-system realities, priority use cases, and acceptance criteria.
• Coordinate dependencies with source-system owners, platform teams, analytics teams, and external partners.
• Establish data profiling, reconciliation, quality testing, freshness monitoring, lineage, and alerting for each delivered data product.
• Ensure source-to-Silver traceability, including authoritative source identification, transformation logic, ownership, metadata, and data-quality expectations.
• Implement access controls, sensitive-data classification, masking, retention, and regional/data-residency requirements.
• Drive resolution of data defects, schema changes, pipeline failures, and quality issues through clear ownership and service-level expectations.
• Set priorities, technical direction, delivery expectations, and quality standards for the engineering team.
• Coach engineers in data engineering, cloud development, testing, observability, and product-oriented delivery practices.
• Create an effective onshore/offshore delivery model with defined handoffs, overlap hours, documentation standards, ceremonies, and escalation paths.
• Communicate delivery progress, risks, tradeoffs, and decisions clearly to technical and business stakeholders.
• Build a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and reliable execution.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of data engineering, software engineering, or data-platform experience, including 2+ years leading engineers, technical workstreams, or large-scale delivery.
• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale ingestion and transformation pipelines.
• Strong hands-on expertise in SQL, Python, Spark/PySpark, and modern ELT/ETL patterns.
• Experience with Databricks, Delta Lake, or a comparable lakehouse platform; experience with cloud storage, orchestration, and CI/CD.
• Strong understanding of Bronze/Silver/Gold (or equivalent layered data-platform patterns).
• Experience implementing data quality, observability, lineage, metadata, and production support practices.
• Proven ability to partner with architects, data modelers, product leaders, and domain stakeholders.
• Experience leading distributed teams and creating effective delivery practices across time zones.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain technical choices, risks, and tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.

Technologies

• SQL
• Python
• Spark
• PySpark
• ELT
• ETL
• Databricks
• Delta Lake
• CI/CD
• Bronze/Silver/Gold
• change-data-capture

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Unity Catalog or comparable governance, catalog, and access-control capabilities.
• Experience with data contracts, schema evolution, change data capture, APIs, event streaming, and large-volume data processing.
• Experience supporting multiple data domains, global data products, or regional data-residency requirements.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, DataOps, and automated environment provisioning.
• Experience in a regulated, high-scale, or operationally sensitive environment.

Role Details

• Location: New York, NY (onsite)
• Compensation: USD 170,000 - 190,000 per year
• Experience Level: 8+ years

Additional Information

• As part of the selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of its locations prior to a hiring decision.
• Qualified individuals with a disability or disabled veterans who require support during the application and/or recruitment process may request a reasonable accommodation by emailing [email protected].
• VERSANT Media is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.
• VERSANT Media is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity.