Copy of Lead Databricks Engineer (Senior Software Engineer II)

Company Description

At Nielsen, we are passionate about our work to power a better media future for all people by providing powerful insights that drive client decisions and deliver extraordinary results. Our talented, global workforce is dedicated to capturing audience engagement with content - wherever and whenever it’s consumed. Together, we are proudly rooted in our deep legacy as we stand at the forefront of the media revolution. When you join Nielsen, you will join a dynamic team committed to excellence, perseverance, and the ambition to make an impact together. We champion you, because when you succeed, we do too. We enable your best to power our future.

Job Description

Strategic Mandate

As the Data Platform Lead, you are the technical owner and steward of Nielsen’s Databricks Lakehouse for Corporate function. You will drive the strategy, architecture, and operational maturity of our Databricks ecosystem end to end — from workspace and Unity Catalog design to cost governance and platform reliability. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and data governance: you will define the guardrails, standards, and reusable patterns that let every engineering and analytics team build confidently on a secure, scalable, and cost-efficient foundation. You will act as the “Platform Authority” for Databricks, ensuring the lakehouse scales with the business while remaining governed, observable, and audit-ready. Critically, you will build an AI-driven data platform — architecting AI-native capabilities (feature stores, vector search, GenAI-ready pipelines) directly into the platform, while also using AI-assisted and agentic engineering practices to build, manage, and scale the platform itself faster and more reliably

Qualifications

Core Goals & Responsibilities

• Lakehouse Platform Ownership: Own the end-to-end architecture of the Databricks Lakehouse, including workspace topology, cluster policies, compute strategy (job clusters, SQL warehouses, serverless), and multi-cloud deployment patterns (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Unity Catalog & Governance: Design and enforce the global data governance model — catalogs, schemas, access controls, lineage, and audit logging — via Unity Catalog, ensuring consistent metadata management and fine-grained access across business units.
• Data Engineering Standards: Define and enforce best practices for Delta Lake table design, Delta Live Tables (DLT) pipelines, medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold), and performance optimization (Z-ordering, liquid clustering, partitioning, file compaction).
• Platform Reliability & Automation: Partner with CloudOps and DevOps to industrialize the platform through Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/Databricks Asset Bundles), CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring, targeting 99.99% platform availability.
• FinOps & Cost Governance: Own cost transparency and optimization across the Databricks estate — cluster right-sizing, workload isolation, chargeback/showback models, and proactive budget alerting — bringing “Strategic Foresight” to cloud spend.
• Cross-Functional Enablement: Work directly with Data Engineering, Analytics, Data Science, and business stakeholders (Finance, HR, Product) to translate requirements into platform capabilities and self-service patterns.
• Governed AI Enablement: Own the governed rollout of AI use cases and native AI features (e.g., Databricks Genie, AI/BI Dashboards, Mosaic AI) on the platform. You hold the keys to unlocking GenAI and natural-language analytics for the business, safely, within Unity Catalog’s governance and access-control boundaries.
• Community & Mentorship: Build and lead a community of practice for Databricks developers across the organization — publishing standards, running enablement sessions, and unblocking delivery friction for engineering teams

Additional Information

Expertise & Technology Stack

• Core Engineering: 8–10+ years of deep experience in data engineering, data platform architecture, or distributed systems, with 3+ years specifically architecting and operating Databricks environments at scale.
• Databricks Platform Engineering: Proven hands-on experience building, managing, running, and scaling a production-grade Databricks Data Platform end-to-end — including Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Delta Live Tables, Databricks Workflows, Databricks SQL, and cluster/compute policy design.
• AI-Native Platform & AI-Assisted Engineering: E…