About the role
from listingData Engineer – AWS, Data Science & AI
Contract | Aus Citizenship required
Sydney / Melbourne
$800-950 a day inc super
The Role :
An opportunity is available for an experienced Data Engineer to join a data-focused team supporting advanced analytics, data science, machine learning and AI initiatives within a government environment.
You'll be responsible for designing, building and maintaining scalable, reliable data pipelines and production-ready data products, helping transition solutions from prototype through to secure, operational delivery.
Working closely with data scientists, ML engineers, solution architects and platform teams, you'll translate complex data requirements into robust engineering solutions, applying modern software engineering, cloud and DevOps practices throughout the development lifecycle.
Please note: Applicants must be Australian citizens and able to obtain a Baseline security clearance, with NV1 clearance highly regarded.
Key Responsibilities
Design, build, test and maintain scalable batch and event-driven data pipelines to support analytics, machine learning and AI use cases.
Develop curated, reusable and well-documented data products from structured and unstructured data sources.
Partner with data science and ML teams to productionise data preparation, feature engineering and model input/output pipelines.
Translate business and analytical requirements into technical designs, delivery plans and acceptance criteria.
Implement data quality controls, validation, metadata, lineage, monitoring, logging and alerting.
Optimise Python, SQL and cloud workloads for performance, reliability, security and cost efficiency.
Apply modern DevOps practices, including version control, automated testing, CI/CD and infrastructure as code.
Develop and maintain technical documentation, data mappings, interface specifications and operational runbooks.
Collaborate with architecture, security, privacy and platform teams to ensure solutions meet governance and operational requirements.
Essential Skills & Experience
AWS data engineering: Demonstrated experience designing and delivering production-grade data pipelines using AWS services such as S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, EMR, Kinesis and Step Functions, or equivalent managed services.
Data engineering fundamentals: Strong understanding of ETL/ELT patterns, data modelling, orchestration, data quality testing, metadata and lineage across structured and unstructured datasets.
Python development: Strong programming skills, with experience writing maintainable, modular, testable code for production environments. Java or Scala experience is also beneficial.
Advanced SQL: Strong SQL skills, including query optimisation, performance tuning and working with large or complex datasets.
Software engineering & DevOps: Experience with Git, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
Cloud infrastructure & containers: Hands-on experience delivering cloud-based data solutions in containerised environments, such as Docker, ECS or EKS.
Security & operations: Understanding of access controls, secrets management, secure data handling, monitoring and production support.
Desirable Experience
Experience supporting data science, machine learning, generative AI or document intelligence solutions.
Exposure to feature pipelines, vector or search-based retrieval, model outputs and evaluation datasets.
Experience with modern data platforms and processing technologies such as Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, Spark or dbt.
Familiarity with MLOps or DataOps, including model and data versioning, reproducibility, monitoring and automated deployment.
Experience with SAS Base Programming.
Eligibility requirements:
Australian citizenship is mandatory.
Ability to obtain a Baseline security clearance is required; NV1 is preferable.
The successful candidate will bring strong hands-on engineering capability, a production-focused mindset and the ability to collaborate across data, AI and technology teams to deliver secure, scalable and maintainable solutions.
Seniority level: Mid-Senior level
Employment type: Contract
Industries: Government Administration and Information Services