Senior Data Platform Engineer

SolarWinds

Salary undisclosed

Cork, IrelandContractHybridProficient

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Description

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

About this role

SolarWinds is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to serve as the technical owner of their BigQuery and Dataplex infrastructure in Cork on a hybrid basis (3 days on-site, 2 remote). This is a contract role focused on keeping a production data platform reliable while raising the bar for how the wider team uses it.

The role sits at the intersection of platform operations and governance. You'll manage BigQuery administration—IAM, cost optimization, dataset structure—alongside Dataplex security administration, ensuring PII and sensitive data are masked and accessed according to least-privilege principles. You'll monitor Fivetran ingestion pipelines for failures and performance issues, troubleshoot end-to-end ELT integrity, and act as the first responder for platform incidents during business hours. Beyond firefighting, you're expected to be a source of BigQuery best-practice guidance, helping teams optimize queries and adopt new GCP features that improve cost, performance, or reliability.

This demands deep, hands-on production experience with BigQuery, Dataplex, and GCP IAM—not theoretical knowledge. You'll need proven experience with an ELT tool like Fivetran, comfort working in regulated or PII-sensitive environments, and the discipline to maintain auditable access controls that hold up to governance and compliance review. You'll partner closely with Data Governance and Cloud Security teams to translate policy into technical configuration. If you thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment and want to own a critical piece of the data infrastructure, this role offers the depth and scope to do that.

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Pay for this role

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