Senior Data Science Engineer

About the Role Irth is building a modern, multi‑cloud, enterprise‑grade data estate—a unified Databricks‑based platform that consolidates data across all Irth products, spanning AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. We are seeking a Senior Data Architect to lead the design, governance, and strategic direction of this data estate and to work closely with data engineering teams to bring it to life.
This is a high‑impact, highly visible technical leadership role responsible for defining the medallion architecture, ensuring robust governance and security, and enabling scalable analytics, AI/ML, and cross‑product insights.

Design the high‑level and detailed architecture blueprint for Irth’s new Databricks‑based data estate, including lakehouse patterns, medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold), and semantic layers.
Develop a multi‑cloud ingestion and consolidation strategy for data sourced from AWS (S3, RDS, DynamoDB), Azure (SQL MI, Storage Accounts), GCP, and on‑prem systems.
Define patterns for data lineage, metadata management, data quality, CDC/SCD, streaming and batch ingestion, and federated query capabilities.
Establish an enterprise‑level data governance model, including classification schemas, residency rules, cataloging (Unity Catalog), retention policies, and security standards.
Partner with security and compliance teams to enforce GDPR, PIPEDA, Australian Privacy Act, SOC 2, and other regulatory requirements.
Architect for scalability, reliability, cost‑efficiency, and support of downstream analytics, reporting, GIS workflows, and AI/ML workloads.
Produce architectural documentation, diagrams, runbooks, and design standards / best practices.
Implementation Leadership & Engineering Partnership
Collaborate closely with a distributed team of data engineers to implement ingestion pipelines, Delta Lake storage patterns, orchestration workflows, and Databricks Lakeflow components.
Provide technical leadership, code reviews, architectural guidance, and hands‑on support when needed.
Work with DevOps/Platform teams on infrastructure, identity, networking, VPC/VNet, and CI/CD integration.
Establish monitoring, observability, and operational governance for the data estate.
Data Governance, Security & Compliance
Define and enforce RBAC/ABAC policies, encryption standards, audit logging, and tenant‑level isolation.
Ensure ongoing compliance with data residency and cloud‑specific regulatory constraints.
Analytics, AI/ML, and Product Enablement
Architect support for operational reporting, BI (Power BI, Databricks SQL), semantic modeling, and consumption patterns.
Design foundations enabling AI/ML use cases such as predictive risk modeling, summarization, geospatial analytics, and LLM‑driven insights.
Advance a BI‑tool‑agnostic semantic model strategy for consistent business definitions across products.
Serve as Irth’s senior expert on Databricks Lakehouse architecture, modern data engineering, and multi‑cloud data strategy.
Mentor engineers and analysts in best practices for data modeling, governance, pipeline design, and scalable architectures.
Partner with product teams, executives, and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical data solutions.
Participate in vendor evaluations, roadmap planning, and architectural governance boards.
8+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or platform architecture, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead role.

• Deep expertise with Databricks (Azure preferred), including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, SQL Warehouses, Lakehouse design, and pipeline orchestration.
• Strong experience building multi‑cloud or hybrid data architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Advanced SQL and experience with one or more: Python, Scala, PySpark, Spark SQL.
• Strong understanding of security, compliance, RBAC/ABAC, encryption, and data residency considerations.
• Experience with CDC, SCD Type 1/2, streaming ingestion, batch pipelines, and workload performance optimization.
• Demonstrated ability to translate highly complex technical concepts to non‑technical audiences.
• Strong documentation, diagramming, architectural review, and communication skills.

Background in geospatial data, operational risk modeling, or AI/ML enablement.
Knowledge of Power BI semantic modeling or BI‑platform‑agnostic semantic layer design.
Experience with highly regulated or multi‑tenant data environments.
Certifications: Databricks Data Engineer Professional, Databricks Architect, Azure Data Architect, AWS/GCP data certifications.

Unified Databricks Lakehouse deployed with all product/tenant data ingested.
High‑quality lineage coverage and governance adoption.
Compliance with all residency and regulatory policies.
Reduction in engineering overhead and faster delivery of analytics/AI use cases.
Competitive salary

• Health plans options including medical, dental, & vision
• Flexible PTO policy plus company-paid holidays
• Benefits options such as health insurance, life insurance, discounts and perks programs
• Generous “work from home” stipend to get you started
• Hybrid employees have access to snacks, beverages and coffee at our Columbus office