About the role

Senior Data Engineer
Contract through to June 2026
Christchurch

Work on data that actually changes things for people across Aotearoa. This role sits in a large, mission-led organisation, building and running the data platforms that underpin smarter decisions at scale.

You’ll join a delivery-focused team, take a technical lead role, and stay close to the code: designing, building, and optimising modern data solutions in a genuinely collaborative environment.

The role

• Lead the design and build of scalable data pipelines and platforms
• Own and improve data engineering best practice across the team
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring while remaining hands-on
• Work closely with cross-functional stakeholders to turn complex requirements into robust, production-grade data solutions

What you’ll bring
You’re a senior data engineer who’s comfortable owning technical decisions, coaching others, and getting deep into the detail of pipelines, performance, and reliability.
You’ll need:

• Strong, practical experience across the Databricks ecosystem
  • Delta Lake, Notebooks, SQL/PySQL, Python, PySpark, Pandas, Unity Catalog
• Proven experience designing and building ETL/ELT pipelines
  • Ideally within a medallion / lakehouse-style architecture
• Hands-on experience with orchestration, monitoring and optimisation of Spark workloads
• Experience implementing CI/CD for data (ideally using Azure DevOps)
• Solid grounding in core data engineering patterns: ingestion, transformation, data quality, storage
• Demonstrated ability to mentor, set technical direction and support good engineering practice
• Experience working in Agile delivery teams

Nice to have

• Exposure to modern cloud data warehouses
  • e.g. Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Azure Synapse, Azure SQL
• Experience building semantic models and dashboards in tools like Power BI or Tableau

Why this role

• High-impact, public-purpose work
• Tight-knit, supportive team with strong engineering practices
• Flexible working options
• Christchurch-based; must have current NZ work rights

Interested?
Click ‘Apply now’ with your cover letter and most up-to-date CV, or contact Emma at emma@potentia.co.nz for more information.