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