Senior Data Platform Engineer

Xcel Energy (NASDAQ: XEL) is a leading energy provider and Fortune 500 company, dedicated to serving millions of electricity and natural gas customers across eight states: Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico and Texas. We make energy work better for our customers, helping them thrive every day. That means always raising the bar - delivering better service and providing more reliable, resilient, and sustainable energy. 

Xcel Energy is a place where you’ll have opportunities to grow, expand your skills, and help lead the clean energy transition. We offer meaningful rewards, recognition, and support to help you build your career and make an impact - both on the job and beyond. Most importantly, it means you’ll be joining a company that knows employees are the driving force behind its success and is committed to helping you be your best.

Position Summary

This senior Data Platform Engineer is responsible for the design, administration, security, governance, and support of Xcel Energy's enterprise Databricks Lakehouse Platform across AWS and GCP. This role provides technical leadership for cloud-based data platform services, including platform operations, Unity Catalog, identity and access management, automation, monitoring, disaster recovery, and cost optimization. Working across data engineering, infrastructure, architecture, security, and business teams, the engineer ensures the platform is scalable, reliable, secure, and capable of supporting enterprise analytics, reporting, and AI/ML initiatives.

Essential Responsibilities

• Solution Delivery: Lead and support solution lifecycle technical activities. Ensure solutions are designed for great user experience and operational performance. Lead design, ensuring Enterprise Architecture, Security, Audit, Operations and Compliance aspects are continuously integrated into solutions. Provide input to cost and schedule estimation. Responsible for overall integrity of system design and operation.
• Relationship Management: Conduct peer reviews and approve system changes and technical solution design. Coach and mentor less experience team members. Partner cross-organizationally to drive minimal costs on optimal solutions. Provide in-depth technical information to stakeholders as needed.
• Strategy & Planning: Innovate through usage of industry emerging capabilities and evolving customer needs. Provide input to strategic roadmap and technical dependencies. 
• Subject Matter Expertise: Continuously stay current on, and apply, technical industry knowledge pertaining to the respective domain
• Operations: Review solution performance and continually assess health of systems. Track and drive awareness to operational and technical debt risks. Provide escalated support to incident and problem management with vendors and internal teams. Utilize analytics to improve availability, reliability, efficiency, and capacity.

Minimum Requirements

• Ten years of related functional experience.
• Bachelor's degree in Technology, Science, Business or related field, or 4 years of experience equivalent to the position.
• Excellent communication skills, effective with varying organizational levels and skill set, and able to translate between technical and non-technical concepts.
• Excellent Relationship Management and collaboration skills, with a track record of working as one team cross-organizationally to drive inovation and business results.
• Expertise managing the lifecycle of technical solutions.
• Deep Subject Matter Expertise within the respective system domain products, platforms, processes and architecture.
• Broad and deep knowledge of technology architecture, infrastructure, network, security and software principles and models.
• Experience working in partnership with internal and external vendors.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Extensive knowledge of future technology trends within area of expertise. Demonstrated leadership on technical aspects of large scale projects.
• Experience coaching other developers in system deployment or operational troubleshooting.
• Experience with delivery methodologies (Waterfall, Agile, Scrum) and operational models (ITIL).
• Experience and understanding of core IT Service Management functions, such as Change Management and Incident Management.

Preferred Requirements

• Five or more years of hands-on experience administering and supporting the Databricks Lakehouse Platform in AWS and/or GCP environments.
• Experience with AWS and GCP cloud services, including IAM roles and policies, service accounts, networking, storage, security integration, and resource governance.
• Experience administering Unity Catalog and enterprise identity, access, security, and data governance controls.
• Experience developing and supporting scalable data ingestion solutions using Databricks Lakeflow, ZeroBus, and other Databricks-native ingestion capabilities.
• Experience integrating Databricks with external applications, BI tools, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, ingestion platforms, and ETL/ELT technologies.
• Experience with Databricks Lakebase, including connectivity, security, administration, and application integration.
• Experience designing and supporting Lakehouse Federation and secure federated data access across platforms and data sources.
• Experience configuring, deploying, and maintaining Databricks workspaces, clusters, and associated cloud resources using infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform.
• Strong working knowledge of SQL, Python, Apache Spark, GitLab CI/CD pipelines, MLOps, and Databricks Asset Bundles.
• Experience monitoring and optimizing Databricks performance, reliability, scalability, security, compliance, and cloud costs.
• Experience managing platform releases, upgrades, backup strategies, and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with data engineering, data science, BI, infrastructure, architecture, security, operations, and business teams to deliver enterprise Databricks solutions.
• Experience in the utility or energy industry is a plus.

Our culture is grounded in shared values and employee commitments that guide how we work, support one another, and grow together.

Our Values

Connected, Committed, Trustworthy, Safe

Our Employee Commitments

• Work that makes a difference
• A team you can count of
• Opportunities to grow
• Rewards that help you thrive

Xcel Energy provides job applicants reasonable accommodations for disabilities throughout the application process. If you are in need of an accommodation to complete the application process, now or at any time in the future, please complete the Applicant Accommodation Request Form. 

Benefit plans are subject to change and Xcel Energy has the right to end, suspend, or amend any of its plans, at any time, in whole or in part.

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