Senior Data Platform Engineer

We work in a hybrid mode 3+2, with a minimum of 3 days at the office and a maximum of 2 days at the home office.

We employ only via an employment contract.

ROLE OVERVIEW

SolarWinds is hiring a Data Platform Engineer to own BigQuery platform administration, Dataplex-based data security, and end-to-end ELT integrity across the Enterprise Data stack. BigQuery, GCP, and Dataplex are the core depth this role brings, with Fivetran ingestion reliability and pipeline performance as a close second.

Beyond keeping the platform reliable, this role is also expected to be a source of BigQuery best-practice guidance — helping the wider team get more out of the platform, and driving adoption of new BigQuery and GCP features where they improve performance, cost, or reliability.

A core expectation is disciplined, auditable access administration: BigQuery and Dataplex govern PII and sensitive data across the platform, so this role's IAM and policy-tag work needs to hold up to governance and compliance scrutiny, done in partnership with the Data Governance and Cloud Security teams on standards.

WHAT THIS ROLE OWNS

• Ingestion reliability — monitoring, triage, and troubleshooting for Fivetran connectors feeding BigQuery.
• BigQuery platform administration — IAM, service accounts, cost and performance management, project/dataset structure.
• BigQuery best practices and feature adoption — advising the team on patterns, performance, and cost, and evaluating new platform features.
• Dataplex governance and security — user-level permissions, PII masking, and policy tag administration, executed in partnership with Data Governance (standards) and Cloud Security (access-control policy).
• ELT pipeline integrity and performance — making sure data flows correctly and efficiently from ingestion through BigQuery.
• Runbooks and operational hardening across the tools this role manages.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Ingestion & platform administration

• Monitor Fivetran connectors; investigate warnings, failures, delays, and abnormal load behaviour into BigQuery.
• Administer BigQuery — IAM, service-account patterns, dataset/project structure, cost visibility and optimisation.
• Manage the full user lifecycle (onboarding, role changes, offboarding) for BigQuery and Dataplex access.

BigQuery best practices & feature adoption

• Advise Data Engineering and Analytics teams on BigQuery best practices — partitioning, clustering, query optimisation, and cost management.
• Track new BigQuery and GCP platform features and drive adoption where they improve reliability, performance, or cost.
• Maintain internal guidance and documentation on BigQuery patterns and standards for the wider team to follow.

Dataplex governance & security

• Administer Dataplex policy tags and taxonomies for PII and sensitive-data masking at the column level.
• Grant and audit user-level BigQuery/Dataplex access (Fine-Grained Reader, Masked Reader, and equivalent roles) against least-privilege principles.
• Partner with the Data Governance team, who set PII classification standards and policy-tag taxonomy; this role implements and administers the technical configuration.
• Partner with the Cloud Security team on IAM and access-control standards, ensuring BigQuery/Dataplex configuration aligns with company-wide security policy.

ELT pipeline integrity & performance

• Monitor data integrity and performance end to end, from Fivetran ingestion through BigQuery, catching completeness and freshness issues before they reach downstream consumers.
• Monitor BigQuery job and query performance underlying downstream transformation and reporting, flagging issues to Data Engineering or Business Intelligence when the root cause sits in their layer.

Incident response & hardening

• Act as primary point of contact for ingestion and BigQuery platform incidents — freshness issues, schema drift, load failures — during business hours; this is not a formal on-call rotation.
• Lead root-cause analysis for recurring ingestion/platform issues; convert findings into durable fixes and runbooks.
• Create and maintain operational documentation — runbooks, escalation paths, and recovery procedures for the tools this role manages.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE

Core platform & tooling (must-have)

• Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, especially BigQuery, in a production environment.
• Deep enough BigQuery knowledge to advise others on best practices and evaluate new platform features for adoption, including cost optimisation (partitioning, clustering, slot management).
• Hands-on experience with Dataplex — policy tags, taxonomies, PII/column-level masking, and fine-grained IAM roles.
• Experience with GCP IAM, service accounts, and least-privilege access administration.
• Comfortable working in a regulated or PII-sensitive data environment (e.g. GDPR, HIPAA, or equivalent), given this role's direct exposure to sensitive-data controls.

Ingestion & reliability

• Experience operating or supporting an ELT ingestion tool such as Fivetran, Airbyte, or CData, with an eye for data integrity and pipeline performance.
• Experience with monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis in a production data environment.
• 3+ years in data platform or cloud platform operations roles.

Data fundamentals

• Strong SQL skills; enough data-modelling fluency to troubleshoot across raw, staging, and mart layers without owning the modelling itself.

Operational excellence

• Strong documentation and runbook discipline.
• Proven ability to use the GCP CLI and scripting (Python or Bash) to automate platform administration and access workflows.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE (NICE-TO-HAVE)

• Familiarity with dbt — environments, scheduling, and access administration.
• Familiarity with Tableau or a comparable BI platform — enough to recognise when a downstream issue traces back to a data source.
• Experience supporting Salesforce, NetSuite, or other business-system data pipelines.
• Experience in a SaaS environment with high expectations for data freshness and business continuity.
• Relevant Google Cloud certification (e.g. Professional Data Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect).