Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer 

Type:  6+ Month Contract 

Location:  Atlanta, GA 

Synergis' client is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to help shape and operate their Databricks-based lakehouse and streaming analytics capabilities.  This role blends strong business and analytical judgment with hands-on engineering – partnering with stakeholders to understand problems, translating them into clear requirements, designing pragmatic architectures, and delivering production-grade ingestion and transformation pipelines with ownership through deployment and steady-state operations. 

Senior Data Engineer | Background and Scope 

• Partner with teams across the organization to clarify data and BI needs; perform structured requirements discovery alongside Data Modelers and align with BI development on scope and estimates. 

• Define data requirements; discover, integrate, and wrangle large volumes of structured and semi-structured/unstructured data, validating outcomes with appropriate tooling. 

• Build pipelines that ingest, validate, normalize, cleanse, enrich, aggregate, and publish data from disparate systems into curated layers for BI and advanced analytics. 

• Support standardized datasets as well as ad hoc analysis needs. 

• Partner closely with data science and business intelligence teams to deliver data models and pipelines supporting reporting, research, and machine learning workflows. 

• Implement rigorous data quality approaches for new and evolving sources, iterating with analytics partners to improve trust in datasets used for insights and modeling. 

• Contribute to data policies and technical controls, including access patterns, retention, and anonymizing sensitive attributes in line with enterprise standards. 

• Champion data engineering best practices – testing, observability, and operational readiness – and provide guidance on visualization-friendly dataset design. 

• Use Databricks, SQL, Spark, scripting, and AWS services to integrate systems reliably and efficiently. 

• Help lead initiatives from requirements through implementation, balancing correctness, performance, cost, and maintainability. 

Senior Data Engineer | Requirements 

• Experience: 5+ years of professional data engineering experience manipulating, processing, and extracting value from large datasets in production. 

• Databricks (must have): Hands-on delivery on the Databricks platform, including developing and operating Jobs/Workflows, notebooks, and production pipelines using Spark SQL and/or PySpark. 

• Delta Lake (must have): Building and maintaining Delta Lake tables – incremental processing, merges/upserts, schema evolution, and performance tuning. 

• Delta Live Tables / DLT (must have): Designing, implementing, and operating DLT pipelines in Python or SQL, including pipeline dependencies, incremental processing, and operational monitoring. 

• Unity Catalog (must have): Practical experience with Unity Catalog or equivalent Databricks governance, including secured sharing and catalog/table governance. 

• Apache Spark: 4+ years of hands-on Spark engineering for batch and/or streaming analytics workloads, including performance troubleshooting. 

• Apache Kafka: 3+ years with Kafka or managed equivalents (e.g., Confluent) for high-volume stream processing, including throughput, lag, scaling, and replay considerations. 

• AWS: 3+ years building and operating AWS capabilities supporting analytics platforms (S3, IAM access patterns; Glue, Lambda, MSK as applicable). 

• SQL: Strong ability to write and optimize intermediate-to-advanced queries and translate business logic into reliable datasets. 

• ETL/ELT: Demonstrated delivery of pipelines in a Databricks lakehouse environment, including incremental loads, schema evolution, and data quality checks. 

• Agile: Experience in Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or similar – backlog refinement, iterative delivery, and dependency coordination. 

Senior Data Engineer | Preferred 

• Snowflake or other large-scale analytical database experience. 

• NoSQL exposure (Cassandra or similar) where operational systems feed analytics platforms. 

• Enterprise messaging/integration experience (TIBCO EMS, IBM MQ, etc.) in addition to Kafka. 

• Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 

About Our Client 

Our client is one of the nation’s premier transportation companies. They operate approximately 19,500 route miles in 22 states and the District of Columbia, serves every major container port in the eastern United States, and provides efficient connections to other rail carriers. Our client operates the most extensive intermodal network in the East and is a major transporter of coal, automotive, and industrial products.

The hourly pay rate range for this position is $53 to $85 (dependent on factors including but not limited to client requirements, experience, statutory considerations, and location). Benefits available to full-time employees: medical, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401k and commuter benefits.
 
Synergis is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.  We value diversity and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, age, gender, gender identity, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, military/veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.
 
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including but not limited to, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act.
 
For immediate consideration, please forward your resume to dreeves@synergishr.com
 
If you require assistance or an accommodation in the application or employment process, please contact us at dreeves@synergishr.com.

Synergis is a workforce solutions partner serving thousands of businesses and job seekers nationwide. Our digital world has accelerated the need for businesses to build IT ecosystems that enable growth and innovation along with enhancing the Total Experience (TX). Synergis partners with our clients at the intersection of talent and transformation to scale their balanced teams of tech, digital and creative professionals. Learn more about Synergis at www.synergishr.com.