SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Kabam, a world leader in multiplayer game development (Marvel Contest of Champions, Shop Titans), is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to manage and evolve their data engineering function. This is a people-management role leading a data engineering team with responsibility for the company's data platform, architecture, and strategy.
Key responsibilities include:
**Team Leadership:** Lead and manage the data engineering team with day-to-day direction, performance management, and development. Own the data engineering roadmap and prioritize work against company priorities. Provide technical mentorship and elevate quality through code and architectural reviews.
**Data Architecture & Platform:** Design and evolve the data architecture (lakehouse and medallion layers across GCS, Databricks, and BigQuery) for reliability, consistency, and efficiency. Evaluate and choose technologies based on value, risk, and migration cost. Lead platform migrations and modernization of legacy pipelines. Communicate architectural decisions and trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
**Data Standards & Governance:** Resolve data-definition and implementation questions with backend and game leads. Define and enforce model contracts, testing, and certification. Implement data governance including retention policies, PII and privacy compliance, access control, lineage, and documentation. Work with data stewards to certify data marts and create high-value data assets.
**Cost & Efficiency:** Own accountability for data platform spend (BigQuery, Databricks). Identify and deliver cost and efficiency improvements while balancing spend against performance and reliability. Report cost and efficiency trends to data leadership.
**Data Development & Operations:** Build and maintain data pipelines to high engineering standards using dbt, orchestration tools, and DevOps principles. Own data reliability including SLAs, monitoring, incident response, and stakeholder communication. Identify and prioritize technical debt. Build data quality monitoring and alerting.
**Cross-Team Partnership:** Partner with analytics, reporting, data science, finance, and marketing teams to turn requirements into data products. Manage relationships with external data vendors. Proactively identify where better data could add value and build relationships encouraging data-driven decisions.
**Requirements:**
- Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience
- 7+ years in data engineering, including 2+ years leading engineers or owning a data platform
- Deep expertise in SQL and Python, and in data modeling (dimensional, medallion, or lakehouse patterns)
- Production experience with dbt and a cloud data warehouse (BigQuery preferred)
- Experience defining data standards, contracts, and testing frameworks
- Record of reducing cloud data cost at scale
- Strong grasp of CI/CD and data-ops practices
- Ability to influence peers and stakeholders outside your reporting line
**Nice to have:**
- GCP experience (BigQuery, Dataplex, GKE)
- Databricks or Spark experience
- Game or mobile telemetry experience (monetization, ads, UA data)
- Experience supporting data science, ML, or AI analytics workloads
