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.
- 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).
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.
Top Skills
What We Do
Smartbridge focuses on simplifying business transformation. We apply thought leadership and innovation to bring our customer’s digital agenda to reality. We partner with customers in their journey from vision to adoption, and across the plethora of technology options available today. Smartbridge’s comprehensive list of technology and software partnerships gives us the freedom to remain an objective collaborator with our customers. The suite of Smartbridge services includes Digital Innovation, Systems Modernization, Applications Integration, Data Management, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Enterprise Mobility and Blockchain. An empathetic approach to understanding customer challenges is bred into the Smartbridge culture. It is evidenced by our ability to bring ideation to life for customers and ourselves. As thought leaders with a track record of successful project execution, Smartbridge is committed to fueling your innovation.
