Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer

Houston TX

About the Role:

Client is seeking a Platform Engineer with deep expertise in Databricks administration data governance and platform level engineering standards. This role enables multiple analytics and AI teams to build safely efficiently and consistently on a shared Databricks platform by enforcing data quality ingestion standards security policies and cost governance.

The candidate will technical be the owner of platform guardrails operational stability access patterns and cost controls-ensuring the platform scales reliably across business teams.

Key Responsibilities:

• Platform Administration & Governance
• Administer Databricks workspaces clusters jobs Unity Catalog compute policies environment configuration and platform guardrails.
• Implement and maintain RBAC and ABAC access controls for secure compliant data access.
• Define and enforce data ingestion standards naming conventions schema rules Delta Lake design patterns and data quality expectations.

Data Quality & Ingestion Standards:

• Set platform wide standards for ingestion pipelines Delta architecture lineage versioning and validation.
• Review and approve onboarded pipelines for compliance with platform requirements.
• Partner with data engineering teams to uplift patterns and enforce consistency.
• Security Compliance & Access Controls
• Manage workspace and catalog permissions row/column level policies attribute based filtering and workspace isolation.
• Collaborate with security teams to maintain compliance and enforce global data protection standards.
• Cost Management & Monitoring
• Implement cost thresholds alerts compute policies and usage dashboards to prevent overspend.
• Monitor job and cluster costs detect anomalies and recommend optimization actions.
• Provide visibility into SKU level spend and workspace cost patterns.
• Operational Stability & Observability
• Ensure platform reliability through automated testing CI/CD templates and code governance.
• Build dashboards to track code compliance data access pipeline health schema drift and cost thresholds.
• Resolve platform incidents and prevent recurrence by strengthening guardrails and configurations.

Enablement & Best Practices:

• Define handrails for building on the platform: ingestion Delta conventions CI/CD observability and AI/ML patterns.
• Coach data/analytics teams on compliant onboarding and optimal platform usage.
• Maintain internal documentation patterns code templates and guidance.
• Required Skills & Experience
• 5 years in data engineering or platform engineering with at least 2 3 years in Databricks administration.
• Expert knowledge of Unity Catalog cluster policies Delta Lake Spark workspace configuration and jobs.
• Strong grounding in data governance data modeling ingestion frameworks schema enforcement versioning and lineage.
• Proven experience implementing RBAC and ABAC in Databricks or similar platforms.
• Experience with cost optimization monitoring billing logs and compute governance.
• Strong Python/PySpark and SQL skills; familiarity with DLT Airflow or Databricks Workflows.
• Strong communication skills with ability to set standards and influence teams diplomatically.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in large-scale enterprise data platforms (Azure/AWS/GCP).
• Familiarity with Trading & Supply or other high stakes analytical environments.
• Experience creating dashboards for governance cost compliance and pipeline health.
• Experience with CI/CD GitHub Actions Azure DevOps or similar tools.

Success Indicators:

• Teams consistently follow ingestion and data standards.
• Platform costs stabilized and predictable.
• Strong adoption of platform guardrails templates and operational dashboards.
• Reduced incidents related to access cost or ingestion quality.