At SolarWinds, we’re a people-first company. Our purpose is to enrich the lives of the people we serve—including our employees, customers, shareholders, partners, and communities. Join us in our mission to help customers accelerate business transformation with simple, powerful, and secure solutions.
The ideal candidate thrives in an innovative, fast-paced environment and is collaborative, accountable, ready, and empathetic. We’re looking for individuals who believe they can accomplish more as a team and create lasting growth for themselves and others. We hire based on attitude, competency, and commitment. Solarians are ready to advance our world-class solutions in a fast-paced environment and accept the challenge to lead with purpose. If you’re looking to build your career with an exceptional team, you’ve come to the right place. Join SolarWinds and grow with us!
We work in a hybrid mode 3+2, with a minimum of 3 days at the office and a maximum of 2 days at the home office.
We employ only via an employment contract.
ROLE OVERVIEW
SolarWinds is hiring a Data Platform Engineer to own BigQuery platform administration, Dataplex-based data security, and end-to-end ELT integrity across the Enterprise Data stack. BigQuery, GCP, and Dataplex are the core depth this role brings, with Fivetran ingestion reliability and pipeline performance as a close second.
Beyond keeping the platform reliable, this role is also expected to be a source of BigQuery best-practice guidance — helping the wider team get more out of the platform, and driving adoption of new BigQuery and GCP features where they improve performance, cost, or reliability.
A core expectation is disciplined, auditable access administration: BigQuery and Dataplex govern PII and sensitive data across the platform, so this role's IAM and policy-tag work needs to hold up to governance and compliance scrutiny, done in partnership with the Data Governance and Cloud Security teams on standards.
WHAT THIS ROLE OWNS
- Ingestion reliability — monitoring, triage, and troubleshooting for Fivetran connectors feeding BigQuery.
- BigQuery platform administration — IAM, service accounts, cost and performance management, project/dataset structure.
- BigQuery best practices and feature adoption — advising the team on patterns, performance, and cost, and evaluating new platform features.
- Dataplex governance and security — user-level permissions, PII masking, and policy tag administration, executed in partnership with Data Governance (standards) and Cloud Security (access-control policy).
- ELT pipeline integrity and performance — making sure data flows correctly and efficiently from ingestion through BigQuery.
- Runbooks and operational hardening across the tools this role manages.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Ingestion & platform administration
- Monitor Fivetran connectors; investigate warnings, failures, delays, and abnormal load behaviour into BigQuery.
- Administer BigQuery — IAM, service-account patterns, dataset/project structure, cost visibility and optimisation.
- Manage the full user lifecycle (onboarding, role changes, offboarding) for BigQuery and Dataplex access.
BigQuery best practices & feature adoption
- Advise Data Engineering and Analytics teams on BigQuery best practices — partitioning, clustering, query optimisation, and cost management.
- Track new BigQuery and GCP platform features and drive adoption where they improve reliability, performance, or cost.
- Maintain internal guidance and documentation on BigQuery patterns and standards for the wider team to follow.
Dataplex governance & security
- Administer Dataplex policy tags and taxonomies for PII and sensitive-data masking at the column level.
- Grant and audit user-level BigQuery/Dataplex access (Fine-Grained Reader, Masked Reader, and equivalent roles) against least-privilege principles.
- Partner with the Data Governance team, who set PII classification standards and policy-tag taxonomy; this role implements and administers the technical configuration.
- Partner with the Cloud Security team on IAM and access-control standards, ensuring BigQuery/Dataplex configuration aligns with company-wide security policy.
ELT pipeline integrity & performance
- Monitor data integrity and performance end to end, from Fivetran ingestion through BigQuery, catching completeness and freshness issues before they reach downstream consumers.
- Monitor BigQuery job and query performance underlying downstream transformation and reporting, flagging issues to Data Engineering or Business Intelligence when the root cause sits in their layer.
Incident response & hardening
- Act as primary point of contact for ingestion and BigQuery platform incidents — freshness issues, schema drift, load failures — during business hours; this is not a formal on-call rotation.
- Lead root-cause analysis for recurring ingestion/platform issues; convert findings into durable fixes and runbooks.
- Create and maintain operational documentation — runbooks, escalation paths, and recovery procedures for the tools this role manages.
REQUIRED EXPERIENCE
Core platform & tooling (must-have)
- Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, especially BigQuery, in a production environment.
- Deep enough BigQuery knowledge to advise others on best practices and evaluate new platform features for adoption, including cost optimisation (partitioning, clustering, slot management).
- Hands-on experience with Dataplex — policy tags, taxonomies, PII/column-level masking, and fine-grained IAM roles.
- Experience with GCP IAM, service accounts, and least-privilege access administration.
- Comfortable working in a regulated or PII-sensitive data environment (e.g. GDPR, HIPAA, or equivalent), given this role's direct exposure to sensitive-data controls.
Ingestion & reliability
- Experience operating or supporting an ELT ingestion tool such as Fivetran, Airbyte, or CData, with an eye for data integrity and pipeline performance.
- Experience with monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis in a production data environment.
- 3+ years in data platform or cloud platform operations roles.
Data fundamentals
- Strong SQL skills; enough data-modelling fluency to troubleshoot across raw, staging, and mart layers without owning the modelling itself.
Operational excellence
- Strong documentation and runbook discipline.
- Proven ability to use the GCP CLI and scripting (Python or Bash) to automate platform administration and access workflows.
PREFERRED EXPERIENCE (NICE-TO-HAVE)
- Familiarity with dbt — environments, scheduling, and access administration.
- Familiarity with Tableau or a comparable BI platform — enough to recognise when a downstream issue traces back to a data source.
- Experience supporting Salesforce, NetSuite, or other business-system data pipelines.
- Experience in a SaaS environment with high expectations for data freshness and business continuity.
- Relevant Google Cloud certification (e.g. Professional Data Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect).
SolarWinds is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. SolarWinds will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.
All applications are treated in accordance with the SolarWinds Privacy Notice: https://www.solarwinds.com/applicant-privacy-notice
Skills Required
- Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, especially BigQuery, in a production environment
- Deep BigQuery knowledge, including partitioning, clustering, slot management, cost optimization, and platform best practices
- Hands-on experience with Dataplex, including policy tags, taxonomies, PII or column-level masking, and fine-grained IAM roles
- Experience with GCP IAM, service accounts, and least-privilege access administration
- Experience working in a regulated or PII-sensitive data environment, such as GDPR or HIPAA
- Experience operating or supporting an ELT ingestion tool such as Fivetran, Airbyte, or CData
- Experience with monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis in a production data environment
- Three or more years in data platform or cloud platform operations roles
- Strong SQL skills and data-modeling fluency across raw, staging, and mart layers
- Strong documentation and runbook discipline
- Ability to use the GCP CLI and Python or Bash scripting to automate platform administration and access workflows
- Familiarity with dbt environments, scheduling, and access administration
- Familiarity with Tableau or a comparable BI platform
- Experience supporting Salesforce, NetSuite, or other business-system data pipelines
- Experience in a SaaS environment with high expectations for data freshness and business continuity
- Relevant Google Cloud certification, such as Professional Data Engineer or Professional Cloud Architect
SolarWinds Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about SolarWinds and has not been reviewed or approved by SolarWinds.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is described as comprehensive, with some locations covering healthcare, dental, and vision at 100% and generally well-regarded plan quality. Feedback suggests wellness resources, counseling, and fitness reimbursements further strengthen the offering.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off, holidays, and a sabbatical after five years are part of the package. Feedback suggests global parental leave minimums add meaningful family support to the overall time-off mix.
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Pay Growth & Progression — Compensation is considered solid by many, with consistent raises noted alongside base pay. Feedback suggests bonuses and structured increases contribute to a sense of ongoing pay growth.
SolarWinds Insights
What We Do
SolarWinds is a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software. Our products give organizations worldwide—regardless of type, size, or complexity—the power to monitor and manage their IT services, infrastructures, and applications; whether on-premises, in the cloud, or via hybrid models. We continuously engage with technology professionals—IT service and operations professionals, DevOps professionals, and managed services providers (MSPs)—to understand the challenges they face in maintaining high-performing and highly available IT infrastructures and applications. The insights we gain from them, in places like our THWACK® community, allow us to solve well-understood IT management challenges in the ways technology professionals want them solved. Our focus on the user and commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT management has established SolarWinds as a worldwide leader in solutions for network and IT service management, application performance, and managed services.
