Lead Data Engineer

About the Role

Karbon is transforming how modern businesses manage financial and operational data. As Lead Data Engineer, you are the technical owner of our data platform — the person who sets direction, drives architecture, and is ultimately accountable for what the team builds and ships.

You'll define how we design, build, and evolve a platform that powers AI-driven insights, real-time analytics, and next-generation data experiences for thousands of customers and millions of transactions. You'll be the primary technical voice in cross-functional conversations with analytics, BI, AI, and product teams — and the person who makes sure your team has the clarity, quality bar, and unblocking they need to deliver.

What You'll Own

• Platform strategy and architecture — own the end-to-end design of our data platform: medallion architecture, data contracts, lineage, multi-tenancy, and the technical roadmap that keeps us ahead of scale.

• Cross-functional technical leadership — be the primary data engineering partner for analytics, BI, AI/ML, and product teams; lead design reviews, drive alignment on data contracts, and represent the platform in broader engineering conversations.

• Solution design — run architecture and design for all significant platform initiatives: pipeline infrastructure, semantic layers, graph database integration, streaming, and AI/ML feature engineering.

• Security and governance ownership — accountable for the platform's security model end-to-end: RBAC, row-level security, PII handling, data residency, tenant isolation, and compliance with privacy regulations.

• Engineering quality and standards — set and enforce the bar for how the team builds: testing frameworks, CI/CD for data transformations, observability, code review, and documentation.

• Team enablement — mentor and unblock senior and junior engineers; identify gaps in capability or process before they become delivery risks; ensure the team can consistently produce high-quality work.

• Operational excellence — own platform reliability: monitoring, alerting, incident response playbooks, and cost optimisation as data volume scales.

What Sets You Apart

Required

• 10+ years as a data engineer, with demonstrated experience in a lead, staff, or principal-level role.

• Deep expertise with cloud data platforms, Databricks strongly preferred.

• Proven track record designing and owning large-scale, multi-tenant data architectures — not just contributing to them.

• Strong command of ELT/ETL tooling (Fivetran, Airbyte, or similar), transformation frameworks (dbt), and dimensional modeling at scale.

• Experience driving technical direction across teams: leading design reviews, influencing architectural decisions, and communicating trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience implementing enterprise-grade security and governance: RBAC, RLS, PII masking, data residency, and privacy regulation compliance (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA).

• Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or equivalent) and CI/CD ownership for data systems.

• You've mentored engineers, raised team capability, and unblocked delivery — not just individually shipped.

Highly Valued

• Graph databases (Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, ArangoDB) and graph query patterns.

• Real-time/streaming data (Kafka, Spark Streaming, Fivetran CDC).

• ML infrastructure, feature stores, or MLOps tooling.

• Experience shaping data platform strategy in a scaling SaaS environment.

Our Core Data Stack

• Platform: Databricks (core compute and transformation layer)

• Ingestion: Fivetran and custom pipelines

• Transformation: DLT/ dbt with medallion architecture

• Cloud: Microsoft Azure

• Graph: Neo4j / ArangoDB (evolving)

• Observability: Datadog

• IaC: Terraform

Our architecture continues to evolve toward real-time streaming, graph intelligence, and AI-native data experiences. If you care about platform ownership, engineering excellence, and building a team that ships with confidence — you'll feel right at home here.

Why Work at Karbon?

• Gain global experience across the USA, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada and the Philippines

• 4 weeks annual leave plus 5 extra "Karbon Days" off a year

• Flexible working environment

• Work with (and learn from) an experienced, high-performing team

• Be part of a fast-growing company that firmly believes in promoting high performers from within

• A collaborative, team-oriented culture that embraces diversity, invests in development, and provides consistent feedback

• Generous parental leave

Our Engineering Standards

Balance Speed and Quality Engineers are expected to balance delivery speed with a strong commitment to quality, meeting agreed timelines while producing reliable, maintainable, and well-tested solutions. Sound judgment in making trade-offs between velocity and long-term sustainability is essential.

Collaborate Effectively Engineering is collaborative by default. Team members are expected to contribute constructively in design discussions, reviews, and planning, communicate clearly about progress and risks, and support shared team outcomes in both hybrid and distributed environments.

Build and Maintain Systems Engineers are responsible for building new capabilities while maintaining and improving existing systems. This includes designing scalable solutions, reducing technical debt, supporting operational stability, and contributing to continuous improvement.

Operate with Autonomy A high degree of autonomy is expected. Given clear objectives, engineers should independently translate problems into actionable technical approaches, proactively identify improvements, and continuously expand relevant technical expertise.

Ownership and Accountability Ownership is fundamental. Engineers are accountable for the quality, performance, and customer impact of their work from design through post-release support, and are expected to follow through on commitments.

AI-Enabled Engineering AI is reshaping how software is built, and we are committed to leveraging it as a force multiplier for creativity, impact, and capability. Engineers are expected to confidently apply strong technical fundamentals while embracing AI tools and approaches to enhance productivity, problem-solving, and innovation.

Contribute to Team Culture Engineers contribute positively to a culture of professionalism, transparency, low bureaucracy, and mutual respect, strengthening team performance through authenticity, curiosity, and collaboration.

Please be aware that Karbon will only contact you via email from our domain, karbonhq.com. If you receive an email from any other domain, please do not click any of those links.

Karbon embraces diversity and inclusion, aligning with our values as a business. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single criteria. If you've made it this far in the job description but your past experience doesn't perfectly align, we do encourage you to still apply. You could still be the right person for the role!

We recruit and reward people based on capability and performance. We don’t discriminate based on race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, lifestyle, age, educational background, national origin, religion, physical or cognitive ability, and other diversity dimensions that may hinder inclusion in the organization.

Generally, if you are a good person, we want to talk to you. 😛

If there are any adjustments or accommodations that we can make to assist you during the recruitment process, and your journey at Karbon, contact us at people.support@karbonhq.com for a confidential discussion.

At this time, we request that agency referrals are not submitted for this position. We appreciate your understanding and encourage direct applications from interested candidates. Thank you!