Principal Data Engineer
A senior, hands-on data engineer who owns Firmus's company-wide data architecture: real-time pipelines for GPU and cooling telemetry, the data lake for hardware failure prediction, AI-native agent layers, and governance/compliance. Core stack includes Kafka, Spark, Trino, ClickHouse, Delta Lake/Iceberg, dbt, Airflow, and Kubernetes on bare metal.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical field
- 10+ years in data engineering or data architecture, including at least 5 years making platform-level decisions
- Has been the most senior data engineer or architect in an organisation, owning the architecture rather than contributing to it
- Deep, hands-on knowledge of end-to-end data architecture: ingestion, storage patterns, transformation, semantic layer design, observability, and governance
- Track record designing large-scale data platforms that integrate data across multiple regions or data centres
- Production experience operating high-cardinality time-series and telemetry pipelines at high ingest and update rates
- Production experience across columnar, time-series, relational, object, and vector storage patterns
- Hands-on experience with event streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka for high-throughput, low-latency ingestion
- Hands-on experience with managed data platforms (Databricks or Snowflake) and self-hosted open-source equivalents (Spark, Trino, ClickHouse, Delta Lake or Apache Iceberg)
- Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with distributed processing frameworks such as Apache Spark
- Experience with pipeline orchestration and transformation tooling such as Airflow and dbt, with data quality testing built in
- Kubernetes experience covering Helm-based deployments and stateful data workloads on self-hosted, bare-metal infrastructure
- Experience delivering data governance programmes against compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 Type 2 or ISO 27001
Nice to have
- Background in AI infrastructure, GPU cloud, or high-performance compute, particularly infrastructure telemetry data at scale
- Experience with industrial IoT and OT telemetry pipelines
- Production experience with vector databases and embedding/retrieval pipelines for LLM and AI-agent use cases
Full description
Firmus Technologies
Firmus Technologies is a global leader pioneering the development and operation of efficient AI infrastructure across Asia Pacific.
Founded in Australia in 2019, our mission is to create the most efficient AI infrastructure by combining cutting-edge technology with a steadfast commitment to sustainability.
At Firmus, we are unique in our approach. We design, build, and operate a new class of digital infrastructure – the AI Factory. Through our model-to-grid technology approach, we have pushed the boundaries of multi-generational liquid cooling systems, energy management, AI software orchestration, and construction. For our customers, this approach allows us to make every watt count and deliver low-cost AI tokens globally.
Firmus AI Cloud
Our large-scale GPU cloud platform, Firmus AI Cloud, is purpose-built to deliver energy-efficient AI compute at scale to customers.
It empowers developers, enterprises, educational institutions, and government users to train and deploy AI models with unmatched efficiency and cost savings. With an ever-growing suite of services and applications, we are committed to delivering a cloud experience that is market-leading, proprietary, and built to scale.
ROLE
Firmus Technologies is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to join our Engineering and Technology team. You will own the data architecture across the company, setting the standards, patterns, and technology choices our engineers build on as we scale the platform. Your influence spans the full data stack: streaming telemetry off GPU compute and cooling systems, the data lake feeding hardware failure prediction models, the AI-native layers powering agent-based workflows, and the governance layer that keeps it all secure, discoverable, and compliant. You will be one of the most senior technical voices for data at Firmus: you make the architecture decisions the organisation lives with long-term, and you stay hands-on on the problems that are too complex or too consequential to delegate.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Data Architecture & Technology Strategy
Own the data architecture across Firmus: the patterns, technology choices, and technical standards that teams build on. Make the build-versus-buy, storage-topology, and streaming-versus-batch decisions the organisation lives with long-term and own the outcomes they lead to.
- Platform Build & Operations
Build the core of the data platform hands-on: the real-time and AI data pipelines, the storage layer, and the transformation and semantic layers that serve BI tooling, internal analytics, and customer-facing reporting. Collaborate with the data engineers and platform engineers to deliver and operate streaming and batch ingestion from GPU telemetry, cooling sensors, billing, and incident sources, with clear reliability, schema-evolution, and latency SLAs. Data components run as infrastructure-as-code on the self-hosted, bare-metal Kubernetes. You own their deployment, quality, and storage cost, and work with platform engineers on backup, recovery, and incident response.