Senior Databricks Engineer – Freelance / Contractor (DRWN)

Job title – Senior Databricks Engineer

Client Location – (Remote)

Remote work offering – 100% Remote

Client Industry – Retail / E-commerce

Contract Length – 6 months

Contract type – Freelance / Contractor

Project focus

Our client, a retail/e-commerce business operating across the EU, is building out its lakehouse data platform on Databricks. You’ll join the data team as a hands-on delivery engineer, building and maintaining production data pipelines, defining a reusable semantic layer that serves dashboards, reporting, and downstream pipelines consistently, and implementing the bronze-silver-gold medallion pattern end to end. dbt is the transformation framework used throughout. This is a delivery-focused role, not an architecture-ownership or leadership position.

Key skills and Experience required

• 5+ years of genuine, hands-on Databricks expertise, covering all three of: building and maintaining production data pipelines (ingestion, transformation, orchestration via Databricks notebooks/jobs/workflows); defining reusable, business-friendly semantic models and metrics that serve multiple downstream consumers consistently; and hands-on design/implementation of medallion lakehouse architecture (bronze/silver/gold), able to describe what lives in each layer using their own project as the example
• dbt experience across 3+ separate projects, with dbt used as the actual transformation layer (writing and maintaining dbt models, tests, and documentation), not just familiarity with the tool
• dbt-on-Databricks experience is strongly preferred; dbt experience limited to other platforms (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery) will be probed further
• Evidence of dbt best practice – modular models, schema/data testing, and documentation – as a sign of mature, genuine usage
• Comfortable operating as a hands-on individual contributor delivering pipelines and models day to day

If this role is of interest, please apply with an updated CV.

Darwin Recruitment is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.

Lungelo Nkosi