Senior Data Engineer – Snowflake / dbt / Airflow
Location: Sydney or Melbourne
Engagement Type: Contract
Seniority: Senior
Company: Software@Scale
About Software@Scale
Software@Scale partners with enterprise clients to provide senior, hands-on engineering, cloud, data and platform specialists who can deliver complex technology outcomes at scale.
We work across financial services, enterprise technology and regulated industries, bringing deep technical capability, strong delivery discipline and pragmatic engineering leadership into high-impact client programs.
About the Role
We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer with strong hands-on experience across Snowflake, dbt and Airflow to support a major enterprise data platform initiative.
This role is suited to someone who can design, build and optimise modern data pipelines, transformation frameworks and governed data products in a complex enterprise environment. You will work across ingestion, orchestration, ELT, data modelling, data quality, performance optimisation and operational reliability.
The ideal candidate will be highly proficient in Snowflake engineering, dbt modelling, Airflow orchestration, SQL and Python, with experience delivering production-grade data solutions in banking, financial services or another regulated enterprise environment.
AWS experience is beneficial, but the core focus of this role is modern data engineering across Snowflake, dbt and Airflow.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build and optimise scalable data pipelines across Snowflake-based data platforms.
- Develop robust ELT transformation frameworks using dbt, including staging, intermediate and mart layers.
- Build reusable dbt models, macros, tests, documentation and lineage to improve maintainability and transparency.
- Use Airflow to orchestrate data workflows, manage dependencies, schedule pipelines and support production reliability.
- Work with large, complex and semi-structured datasets across enterprise source systems.
- Design and implement Snowflake data models, schemas, warehouses, tasks, streams and performance optimisation patterns.
- Support data warehouse modernisation, legacy migration and cloud data platform uplift initiatives.
- Implement data quality controls, validation checks, reconciliation logic, freshness checks and exception handling.
- Build and maintain CI/CD practices for data pipelines and transformation logic.
- Optimise Snowflake workloads for performance, reliability and cost efficiency.
- Contribute to data governance, lineage, observability, monitoring and operational support practices.
- Translate business and technical requirements into well-designed data engineering solutions.
- Work closely with architecture, engineering, analytics, governance and business stakeholders.
- Produce clear technical documentation, including pipeline designs, data mappings, runbooks and operational notes.
Core Skills & Experience
- Strong commercial experience as a Senior Data Engineer, Data Platform Engineer or Analytics Engineer.
- Deep hands-on experience with Snowflake in a production environment.
- Strong experience building and maintaining dbt transformation layers.
- Practical experience with Airflow for workflow orchestration and pipeline scheduling.
- Advanced SQL skills, including complex transformations, performance tuning and analytical query design.
- Strong Python experience for data engineering, automation and pipeline development.
- Experience designing ETL / ELT pipelines across batch and near-real-time data workloads.
- Strong understanding of data warehousing, dimensional modelling and Medallion-style data architecture.
- Experience with dbt testing, documentation, lineage, macros and reusable transformation frameworks.
- Experience implementing data quality, reconciliation, freshness and validation controls.
- Experience with CI/CD, Git-based delivery and automated deployment practices.
- Strong focus on production reliability, observability, monitoring and supportability.
- Ability to work in a complex enterprise environment with multiple stakeholders and systems.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical concepts clearly.
Highly Regarded
- Experience in banking, financial services, insurance or another regulated enterprise environment.
- Snowflake SnowPro certification or equivalent practical Snowflake expertise.
- Experience with data contracts, data mesh-aligned architecture or domain-owned data products.
- Experience with performance and cost optimisation across Snowflake workloads.
- Experience with semi-structured data, schema evolution and automated ingestion frameworks.
- Exposure to Databricks, PySpark or Redshift.
- AWS experience, particularly S3, Glue, EMR, Redshift, Athena, Lambda or Kinesis.
- Experience with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or similar CI/CD tooling.
- Exposure to reporting and analytics platforms such as Power BI, Tableau or QuickSight.
- Consulting, contracting or client-facing delivery experience.
What We Are Looking For
You are a hands-on senior engineer who can take ownership of complex data engineering problems and deliver practical, production-ready solutions.
You are comfortable working across Snowflake, dbt and Airflow, and you understand how to build pipelines and transformation layers that are reliable, testable, governed and easy to operate. You care about data quality, performance, cost, lineage and maintainability — not just getting data from point A to point B.
You will be well suited to this role if you have worked on modern data platforms, warehouse modernisation, enterprise ELT frameworks, governed analytics platforms or large-scale transformation programs.
Why Join Software@Scale
- Work on high-impact data initiatives with leading enterprise clients.
- Join a senior, outcomes-focused engineering consultancy.
- Deliver across modern data platforms using Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, SQL and Python.
- Work with experienced engineers, architects and delivery specialists.
- Competitive contract rates.
- Opportunity to contribute to complex data transformation work in regulated environments.
Apply
If you are a Senior Data Engineer with strong Snowflake, dbt and Airflow experience, we would love to hear from you.
