Principal Data Engineer

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology. When you join Serko, you become part of a team of passionate travellers and technologists bringing people together, using the world's leading business travel marketplace. We are proud to be an equal-opportunity employer, we embrace the richness of diversity, showing up authentically to create a positive impact.
You'll be responsible for collaborating with the engineering leadership group to lead and drive data best practices and data vision across engineering teams, providing mentoring and guidance to other engineers when required. This role will support the architecture team in building the modern data platform strategy and support their value stream in data solution architecture design. You're seasoned senior data engineer looking for a step up into principal level opportunities, this role will take you there.
What you’ll be doing
- Collaborate with architects and principal software engineers and provide technical expertise in selecting new or improving existing data platforms
- Work with Platform, Architecture, and Security teams to ensure data platform solutions are designed for performance, security, durability and scalability
- Lead the development and implementation of proof-of-concept/experiment projects to validate new data/database models and data platform solutions.
- Work with Engineering, Product Management and other business departments to achieve data extract, load, transform and visualisation needs
- Provide technical guidance to team members comprised of SQL developers/DBAs, data engineers and data/business analysts
- Develop new or improve existing complex SQL, PowerShell, Python, and Spark scripts used in both SQL-based and non-SQL-based OLTP and OLAP systems
- Align individual short- and medium-term tactical initiatives to long-term strategy
- Optimise the data pipelines and deployment pipelines to reduce cost
- Advocate for SQL and data engineering best practices
What you’ll bring to the team
- Deep understanding of modern data architecture, relational database architecture and bleeding-edge technologies and trends in the data platform and AI (near-future) space
- Deep understanding of databases, data modelling, data warehousing and SQL best practices.
- Experience with Azure data components: Azure SQL, Synapse Analytics, Data Factory, Power BI, Spark, CosmosDB, and AzureML.
- Experience with modern engineering practices (e.g. database infrastructure automation, data pipeline continuous integration and continuous delivery)
- Experience designing and implementing data warehouses/datamarts using Star-schema, Snowflake and/or Data Vault 2.0 methodology
- Experience using Microsoft SQL Server stack: SSIS, SSAS, SSRS and Power BI
- Experience mentoring others
- Experience inspiring change across multiple teams
- Adept at communicating and collaborating with all key stakeholders.
At Serko, we aim to create a place where people can come and do their best work. This means you will be operating in an environment with great tools and support to enable you to perform at the highest level of your abilities, producing high-quality and delivering innovative and efficient results. Our people are fully engaged, continuously improving, and encouraged to make an impact.
Some of the benefits of working at Serko are:
- A competitive base salary
- KiwiSaver covered with employee contribution matched up to 3% of salary, and life insurance.
- Health & Wellbeing: discounted Southern Cross Health Insurance, access to confidential support, guidance and counselling service, wellbeing and voluntary leave and free flu shots.
- Focus on development: access to a learning & development platform, committed budget and opportunity for you to own your career pathways.
