Principal Data Platform Engineer
A hands-on principal-level role at consultancy Simple Machines in Sydney: designing and building greenfield cloud-native data platforms, batch and real-time pipelines, and data products for enterprise, scale-up and government clients, with technical leadership across Databricks, Snowflake, AWS/GCP, Spark, Kafka/Flink and IaC/CI-CD tooling.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Strong Python and SQL
- Deep experience with Spark and modern data platforms (Databricks / Snowflake)
- Solid grasp of cloud data services (AWS or GCP)
- Demonstrated ownership of large-scale data platform architectures
- Strong data modelling skills and architectural decision-making ability
- Comfortable balancing trade-offs between performance, cost, and complexity
- Built and operated large-scale data pipelines in production
- Comfortable with multiple storage technologies and formats
- Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Pulumi)
- CI/CD pipelines using tools like GitHub Actions, ArgoCD
- Data testing and quality frameworks (dbt, Great Expectations, Soda)
- Experience in consulting or professional services environments
- Strong consulting instincts — able to challenge assumptions and guide clients toward better outcomes
- Comfortable mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical culture
Full description
Principal Data Platforms Engineer
Who We Are
Simple Machines is a global, independent technology consultancy operating across Sydney, New Zealand, London, Poland and San Francisco. We design and build modern data platforms, intelligent systems, and bespoke software at the intersection of Data Engineering, Software Engineering and AI.
We work with enterprises, scale-ups, and government to turn messy, high-value data into products, platforms, and decisions that actually move the needle.
We don’t do generic. We build things that matter - We engineer data to life™.
The Role
This is a hands-on principal engineering role, not an architecture-only seat and not a support function. You’ll be responsible for technical direction, platform design and architectural decision-making.
You'll design and build greenfield data platforms, real-time pipelines, and data products for clients who are serious about using data properly. You’ll work in small, high-calibre teams and operate close to both the problem and the client.
If you enjoy solving hard data problems, shaping modern architectures (data mesh, data products, contracts), and delivering real outcomes — this is your lane.
What You’ll Be Doing
Lead Platform & Architecture Design
- Own the end-to-end architecture of modern, cloud-native data platforms
- Design scalable data ecosystems using data mesh, data products, and data contracts
- Make high-impact architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, processing, and access layers
- Ensure platforms are secure, compliant, and production-grade by design
Build Modern Data Platforms
- Design and deliver cloud-native data platforms using Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, and GCP
- Apply modern architectural patterns: data mesh, data products, and data contracts
- Integrate deeply with client systems to enable scalable, consumer-oriented data access
Develop High-Performance Pipelines
- Build and optimise batch and real-time pipelines
- Work with streaming and event-driven tech such as Kafka, Flink, Kinesis, Pub/Sub
- Orchestrate workflows using Airflow, Dataflow, GlueWork at Scale
- Process and transform large datasets using Spark and Flink
- Design systems that perform in production - not just on paper