Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer

Are you an experienced data engineer who thrives on solving complex technical challenges, leading talented engineers, and pushing the boundaries of what modern data platforms and AI can accomplish? Are you looking for an opportunity to put those skills to work in a Christian ministry whose mission aligns with your faith?

Ligonier Ministries is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for our enterprise data engineering practice. This is an opportunity to shape the next generation of our data infrastructure—leading a major transition from Microsoft Fabric to Databricks while pioneering the responsible use of agentic AI to transform how data engineering gets done.

At Ligonier, reliable data enables sound stewardship, informed decisions, and effective ministry operations. Your work will support everything from financial accountability and constituent engagement to advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI—all in service of our mission to proclaim, teach, and defend the holiness of God in all its fullness to as many people as possible.

What You'll Do

• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers, establishing technical standards, guiding architecture, and ensuring high-quality delivery.

• Drive platform modernization by leading the phased migration of data engineering workloads from Microsoft Fabric to Databricks, leveraging Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Apache Spark, and Lakeflow.

• Pioneer AI-accelerated engineering by integrating agentic AI development tools into engineering workflows to improve productivity, automate repetitive work, and accelerate delivery while maintaining rigorous quality controls.

• Own enterprise data reliability, ensuring our data warehouse, pipelines, and integrations deliver accurate, timely, and trustworthy information.

• Engineer scalable data solutions using SQL, Python/PySpark, dimensional modeling, and modern lakehouse architectures.

• Collaborate across the ministry to turn complex business requirements into dependable data products that enable reporting, analytics, and AI.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of progressive data engineering experience, including at least 3 years providing technical leadership for a data warehouse or data platform team.

• Expert-level SQL/T-SQL and Python/PySpark skills, with proven ability to optimize complex data transformations and pipelines.

• Strong Microsoft Fabric and Azure data platform experience, with the ability to assess existing architectures, migrate production workloads to Databricks, and maintain data reliability throughout the transition.

• Expert-level Databricks proficiency, with deep, hands-on production experience in Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Apache Spark/PySpark, and Lakeflow. Experience leading an enterprise data platform migration to Databricks is strongly preferred.