Job Description

Senior/Lead Azure Data Engineer (Contract — 3 Months)
Location: Remote (U.S.), core overlap with  CST
Engagement:   Contract only (C2C) — no C2H for this role
Start: Immediate |  Duration: 3 months (extension possible)
Comp: Competitive hourly rate (DOE)

About Smartbridge
Smartbridge simplifies business transformation across  App Development, Automation, Data & Analytics, and Modernization . We build production systems for clients in  Energy, Life Sciences, and Food & Beverage .

The Opportunity
Our project needs a  senior/lead who can both  design and  build modern Azure data platforms—someone with  strong coding in T-SQL and Python/PySpark,  architectural judgment , and  deep database chops (modeling, performance, reliability). Because this is  contract-only , fit must be tight and immediate impact.

What You’ll Own (Architecture + Build)

• Architecture: Define the target-state Azure data architecture (ingestion, orchestration, storage zones, serving patterns), security/networking boundaries, cost/perf tradeoffs, and promotion strategy (Dev→Test→Prod).
• Pipelines & Code: Implement robust ELT/ETL with  ADF/Synapse Pipelines (parameters, reusable templates, CI/CD). Hands-on in  T-SQL and  Python/PySpark for transformations, utilities, and tests.
• Database Excellence: Physical/semantic modeling,  partitioning ,  columnstore strategies, statistics management,  query plan analysis,  index design, concurrency & transaction isolation, workload management.
• Observability & Reliability: SLA/SLO definitions,  Azure Monitor / Log Analytics / App Insights dashboards and alerts; error handling, retries/backoff, idempotency, CDC and schema drift strategies.
• Security & Governance: RBAC, Key Vault, managed identities, private endpoints/VNet, data masking patterns; document data contracts and access patterns.
• Leadership: Code reviews, PR discipline, mentoring, and crisp documentation/runbooks for client handoff.

Must-Have (Senior-Level) Experience

• 8–12+ years in data engineering (recent  Azure focus).
• Expert with  ADF (linked services, datasets, IRs—including self-hosted),  Synapse (SQL pools/serverless, pipelines), and  ADLS/Blob .
• T-SQL : advanced query tuning, execution plan analysis, windowing, TVFs/stored procs, temp tables vs CTE tradeoffs, cardinality estimator know-how.
• Python/PySpark : production data transforms, packaging, and testing.
• CI/CD : Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions (multi-stage releases, approvals, infra + data deployments).
• Proven delivery of  production-grade platforms at scale (TB-level data, strict SLAs).

Not a fit: Primarily BI/reporting backgrounds without strong pipeline/build + DB performance experience.
Nice to Have

• Designed and implemented robust data validation procedures to verify the completeness of data transfers, ensuring all records were successfully migrated and proactively triggering alerts in cases of discrepancies.
• Experience with working with large SQL tables (100 million rows)
• IaC (Bicep/Terraform) for data resources.
• Event-driven integration (Service Bus/Event Grid, CDC tooling).
• Certs: DP-203 or AZ-204 are a plus.

Job Tags

Hourly pay, Contract work, Temporary work, Immediate start, Remote work

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