Lead Data Engineer

Job description

At Kabam, we’re constantly raising the bar of excellence in free-to-play gaming. We hire for passion and diversity so that we can triumph in our collective skill. Our teams are made up of a fusion of personalities and interests bound together by a collaborative nature, fun-loving culture, and a drive to do what it takes to make great games. And this is where you come in… The **Lead Data Engineer** owns Kabam's central data platform end to end, from the game telemetry standard through to the certified data layer that analytics, finance, data science and AI tools are built on. They lead the data engineering team and are accountable for the reliability, quality and cost of petabyte-scale pipelines across GCP and Databricks. They set the standards for how data enters and moves through the platform, and work directly with game, backend and analytics leads to deliver against company priorities. **This role is a full-time, on-site position based 5 days a week at our Downtown Vancouver studio.** ### In this role, you can expect to: **Key Accountabilities** **Team Leadership:** - Lead and manage the data engineering team: day-to-day direction, performance management, and development. - Own the data engineering roadmap and prioritise work against company and data priorities. - Provide technical mentorship and elevate quality through code and architectural reviews. **Data Standards & Upstream Ownership:** - Resolve data-definition and implementation questions directly with backend and game leads. - Define and enforce model contracts, testing and certification so downstream teams can rely on the data. **Data Architecture & Platform:** - Design and evolve the data architecture (lakehouse and medallion layers across GCS, Databricks and BigQuery) for reliability, consistency and efficiency. - Evaluate and choose technologies and vendors based on value, risk and migration cost. - Lead platform migrations and modernisation of legacy pipelines. - Explain architectural decisions and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders. **Cost & Efficiency:** - Accountable for data platform spend, including BigQuery and Databricks. - Identify and deliver cost and efficiency improvements across the data platform, balancing spend against performance and reliability. - Report cost and efficiency trends to data leadership. **Data Development & Operations:** - Build and maintain data pipelines to a high engineering standard using dbt, orchestration tools and devops principles. - Own data reliability: SLAs, monitoring, incident response, and clear communication of impact and timelines during incidents. - Identify and prioritise technical debt against delivery work. - Build data quality monitoring and alerting so issues are caught before stakeholders see them. **Data Governance & AI Readiness:** - Implement data governance: retention policies, PII and privacy compliance, access control, lineage and documentation. - Work with data stewards across teams to certify data marts and create high value data assets. - Collaborate with data scientists on self serve analytics tooling. **Cross-Team Partnership:** - Partner with analytics, core reporting, data science, finance and marketing to turn requirements into data products. - Manage relationships with external data vendors and partners. - Proactively identify where better data could add value for teams, and build relationships that encourage data-driven decisions. ### To be successful in this role, your background includes: - Bachelor's degree in a related field, or equivalent experience. - 7+ years in data engineering, including 2+ years leading engineers or owning a data platform. - Deep expertise in SQL and Python, and in data modelling (dimensional, medallion or lakehouse patterns). - Production experience with dbt and a cloud data warehouse (BigQuery preferred). - Experience defining data standards, contracts and testing frameworks. - A record of reducing cloud data cost at scale. - Strong grasp of CI/CD and data-ops practices. - Able to influence peers and stakeholders outside your reporting line. **Nice to have:** - GCP (BigQuery, Dataplex, GKE). - Experience with Databricks or Spark. - Game or mobile telemetry experience, including monetisation, ads or UA data. - Experience supporting data science, ML or AI analytics workloads. ### Our success is due to the hard work of our people. We share our success with our people through flexible benefits and reward programs, sweet swag, snacks, and more. Here’s a look at some of the support we provide our people: - **Extended Health Coverage:** effective day one, no waiting period! Our benefits cover health, dental, life, disability, and extended paramedical services such as vision care, mental health practitioners, massage, physiotherapy, acupuncture, and much more. - **DEIB Benefits:** DEIB is important to us and to our people - that’s why our benefits include gender-affirming care, fertility care, and other hormonal treatments and drugs. - **Flexible Spending Accounts:** our benefits are built on a flex credit model, so you’re able to choose the coverage levels that are right for you, and allocate the rest to a group RRSP/TFSA, Health Spending account, and/or Personal Spending Account. - **RRSP Matching:**everyone retires eventually, and we help our people save for their futures with a contribution matching program once you reach 90 days with us. - **Commuter Benefit:** we believe in the power of in-person collaboration, and want to support you in making it work for you! We provide a flexible, monthly cash allowance to help cover the costs of transit, parking, or even personal logistics like childcare and pet care. - **PTO and Parental Leave:**we offer paid parental leave, flexible paid time off, paid time off for volunteering, sick leave, and holiday closures. - **Employee and Family Assistance Program: t**his program provides crisis management support, immediate mental health care, and generalized support for emotional, mental, and financial well-being. - **Telus Virtual Health:**we provide increased access to remote healthcare providers for prescription refills or referrals from the comfort of your home. - **Learning and growth:**We encourage people to grow both personally and professionally, and support this through regular lunch & learns and an education stipend. - **Pay transparency:** We share with employees the pay range their role falls within and clear career maps to determine how they can grow within their role or level-up to a promotion. - **Cool spaces:** Our offices are in Vancouver, Montreal, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Whether it’s summers on the rooftop patio in Downtown Vancouver, or watching the fireworks in Montreal’s South Shore - we want our people to feel like their time spent in office is worthwhile! - **Giving back:** Kabammers have a dedicated paid day off every year to volunteer to a cause close to their hearts. Some teams even band together for group volunteer days off-site!