We are seeking a highly experienced and hands-on Senior Data Engineer to lead and contribute to our client's ambitious Big Data initiatives within the dynamic banking sector. This role demands a deep technical expert who can architect, build, and tune complex data systems while providing leadership to a team of data engineers.
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Work Location: Downtown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Contract Duration: 6 months (highly renewable for long-term)
Work Conditions: On-site, Contract
Key Responsibilities:
- Technical Leadership & Hands-On Development: Design, develop, and optimize large-scale data processing systems using the Hadoop ecosystem (HDFS, MapReduce, Hive, Pig, HBase, Flume, Sqoop) and other Big Data technologies.
- Team Management: Lead and mentor a team of data engineers, including both full-time associates and third-party vendors. Manage project priorities, ensure timely delivery, and maintain high-quality standards.
- Data Pipeline Engineering: Write, tune, and maintain complex data pipelines using Java, MapReduce, Hive, and Spark. Implement and manage stream-processing systems like Spark-Streaming.
- Data Modeling & Architecture: Design and build efficient, scalable dimensional data models to enhance data accessibility, quality, and performance for analytics and business intelligence.
- Data Integrity & Deployment: Analyze source data integrity, and lead the deployment, validation, and auditing of data models and attributes for accuracy.
- Performance Tuning: Demonstrate expertise in writing advanced, optimized SQL and perform thorough performance tuning of queries and data jobs.
- Collaboration: Work closely with business intelligence teams to develop top-quality dashboards and data products based on industry best practices.
Essential Qualifications & Experience:
- A minimum of 10+ years of professional experience as a Big Data Engineer.
- In-depth, hands-on knowledge of the Hadoop ecosystem (Cloudera preferred), Apache Spark, and similar distributed data frameworks.
- Proven experience leading a backend/distributed data systems team while remaining technically hands-on.
- Proficiency in Java for MapReduce development and strong skills in Python and/or Scala.
- Expertise with Big Data querying tools such as Hive, Pig, and Impala.
- Strong experience with relational SQL (e.g., Postgres) and NoSQL databases (e.g., Cassandra, HBase).
- Solid understanding of data modeling principles (dimensional modeling) and data warehousing concepts.
- Experience with Linux/Unix systems and shell scripting.
Desirable Skills (A Plus):
- Experience with Azure cloud services (Azure Data Lake, Databricks, HDInsight).
- Knowledge of stream-processing frameworks: Spark-Streaming or Storm.
- Exposure to data science and machine learning tools and technologies.
- Background in the Financial Services or Banking industry.
Personal Attributes:
- Excellent problem-solving abilities for complex networking, data, and software challenges.
- Strong interpersonal and communication skills to effectively collaborate with stakeholders and team members.
- Proven ability to plan, organize, and prioritize work effectively in a fast-paced environment.
- A cooperative team player who assists others and builds positive working relationships.
