Data Platform Lead - IT Transformation

Onward Energy•Denver, CO

5d•Onsite

About The Position

The Data Platform Lead on the IT Transformation Team plays a foundational role in building the data platform that will power Onward Energy’s next phase of growth. The Data Platform Lead will partner with the Transformation Manager and business stakeholders to design, implement, and support a cloud-hosted data repository at Onward. The Data Platform Lead’s efforts will directly impact how Onward Energy can reduce manual effort around data, surfaces operational performance in real time, and unlocks future AI and automation use cases across the fleet.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
4+ years of hands-on data engineering experience building and operating production pipelines and data models.
Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous business problems into well-scoped technical work and to define structure where none exists.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to engage credibly with both engineers and non-technical business stakeholders.
Experience integrating data from heterogeneous source systems - APIs, file-based feeds, relational databases, and time-series or historian data.
Production experience building pipelines in Python and SQL on Spark/Databricks or a comparable distributed framework.
Experience scheduling, orchestrating, and monitoring data pipelines - whether through Databricks Workflows, Airflow, or similar tools.
Experience designing and managing table structures in a Lakehouse or Warehouse environment – including incremental merge patterns, schema evolution, and partitioning strategies.
Experience implementing or operating data governance tooling – including access controls, lineage tracking, and data cataloging – in a Lakehouse or warehouse environment.
Working knowledge of core Azure services in a Databricks context (storage, identity, secrets management) and ability to navigate the ecosystem independently.

Nice To Haves

2+ years in management or technology consulting, demonstrating comfort with ambiguity, a business-first approach to requirements, and the ability to balance an engineering skillset with a business analyst skillset.
Energy industry experience (generation, utilities, ISO/RTO markets) or familiarity with operational technology data such as SCADA or CMMS platforms.
Experience with at least one greenfield or early-stage platform build (Databricks is preferred) where a focus on design / architecture was required.
Familiarity with Power BI semantic modeling and DAX, including how to structure datasets on top of a Lakehouse for performant, self-service reporting.
Experience with Unity Catalog preferred.

Responsibilities

Partner with Solar / Wind / Thermal Operations, Performance Engineering, Asset Management, and other teams to discover and prioritize the first data use cases – contributing to stakeholder interviews, mapping current Excel-based workflows, and defining what to build first on the platform.
Design, build, and maintain ingestion and transformation pipelines in Databricks to bring operational data from AVEVA PI, Ignition, Maximo, Workday, and ISO/market sources into a governed Lakehouse – covering wind, thermal, and solar assets.
Serve as the technical counterpart to external consulting partners engaged in the platform build, translating business requirements into pipeline specifications, validating deliverables, and ensuring work aligns with Onward's long-term architecture.
Own long-term pipeline reliability end-to-end: define data availability and quality standards, build monitoring and alerting, and resolve ingestion or transformation failures before they impact downstream reporting.
Contribute to data governance practices - including ownership models, role-based access for sensitive operational and financial data, and quality standards.