Principal Data & Insights Engineer

• Melbourne - Hybrid work
• Generous Salary + Bonus OR Equity on offer
• Must have working rights for Australia

Who is LocalAgentFinder?

For most people, selling, buying or renting a property is the most important transaction of their lives. That “transaction” is deeply connected to the idea of “home” from which so many of us draw strength. For that and other reasons, the process of transacting property can be both exciting and terrifying.

Our mission is to allow people to feel confident in the property transaction, even if they’ve never done it before. For nearly two decades, we’ve built out a digital platform that connects people with the right real estate agent based on their needs and circumstances.

We are extraordinarily fortunate to have this amazing window into people’s lives, at these critical moments in which they need to make life-changing decisions. We see many other opportunities to develop products and services that can address real fears and concerns, empowering homeowners to make well-informed, confident decisions.

Now's the time for us to level up our technology and really take it to the next level.

Principal Data & Insights Engineering role:

• LocalAgentFinder is in a pivotal transition of change and has to completely modernise its technology offering. Part of this is establishing a new Data & AI platform & team! Reporting into the CTO, the Principal Data & Insights Engineer will grow and lead the Data Engineering team and work with the Product Engineering and AI teams to bring a new Data & AI platform to life - a hypothesis is there to be validated so you're really walking in on day one.

Key responsibilities:

• Capture the architectural designs and data processing patterns for a new data, reporting and AI platform that harnesses the strengths of market-leading technologies and industry best practices.
• Assess and select appropriate technologies and vendors, documenting and socialising significant decisions.
• Provide strategic direction, leadership and mentoring to a cross-functional team of data engineers delivering the platform and the use-cases that run on the platform.
• Design, implement, and optimise robust data pipelines and data queries for efficient data extraction, transformation and processing in both batch and real time.
• Lead the implementation of advanced reporting and visualisation solutions, leveraging best-practice data models and technologies.
• Work with Data Scientists to deliver AI and machine learning solutions that produce predictive, prescriptive and generative insights driving innovation in data-driven decision-making.
• Define coding standards and conduct code reviews, maturing delivery processes and DevOps.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks and security risks.
• Position the architecture and engineering capabilities of the organisation to accommodate and exploit the rapidly evolving potential of A.I. in all its flavours, contributing to reshaping the data culture across the organisation.

First 3 months - will be making key technology decisions driven by a clear understanding of requirements and needs - understand the data and what shape it takes - work on the technology strategy. Using all of those inputs to radify technology decisions (Databricks as the power engineer and PowerBI as the visualisation tool) - coming up with a plan of delivery and breaking the work down into a backlog - shaping out the team and the people required - by the end of the 3 months, start standing up the tools - starting the momentum that a build team can continue - setting up those standards.

First 12 months - deliver the core piece of infrastructure in the business and drive AI-powered tools to customers. Giving management teams high-quality dashboards to make decisions. Enabling self-service within the organisation so people can experiment with data, increasing the literacy of data ability.

What you need to be successful:

• This multifaceted role requires a seasoned data professional with a strong background in data engineering, reporting and AI technologies, coupled with excellent leadership and communication skills.
• Minimum 10 years of experience in a senior data engineering role leading the build of data, reporting and AI platforms and solutions.
• Demonstrable experience designing, building and using modern Data Lake, Data Warehouse and Data Science technologies.
• Deep experience in analytical platforms like Databricks and PowerBI and analytical programming languages including SQL, Python, and Java.
• Deep experience with AWS data services and cloud architecture, including S3, Lambda, SageMaker and Bedrock. DevOps using tools like Git, Terraform, Buildkite
• Data processing technologies including Spark
• Integration technologies; APIs and Events using Kafka
• Modern data modelling techniques: Data Vault 2.0 and Dimensional Data Models
• Experience setting up data governance and data catalogues and rolling them out across an organisation
• Experience leading a team of engineers

This is a unique opportunity to come in and build a product/team from the ground up - we are looking for people who have been there, done it before and can grow with the company as we go to the next level.

For more information, contact [email protected] or click apply.