Https://contango.ae/
About the Role
We are an emerging AI-native product-driven, agile start-up under Abu Dhabi government AND we are seeking a motivated and technically versatile Data Engineer to join our team. You will play a key role in delivering data platforms, pipelines, and ML enablement within a Databricks on Azure environment.
As part of a stream-aligned delivery team, you’ll work closely with Data Scientists, Architects, and Product Managers to build scalable, high-quality data solutions for clients. You'll be empowered by a collaborative environment that values continuous learning, Agile best practices, and technical excellence.
Ideal candidates have strong hands-on experience in Databricks, Python, ADF and are comfortable in fast-paced, client-facing consulting engagements.
Skills and Experience requirements
1. Technical
Databricks (or similar) e.g. Notebooks (Python, SQL), Delta Lake, job scheduling, clusters, and workspace management, Unity Catalog, access control awareness
Cloud data engineering – ideally Azure, including storage (e.g., ADLS, S3, ADLS), compute, and secrets management
Development languages such as Python, SQL, C#, javascript etc. especially data ingestion, cleaning, and transformation
ETL / ELT – including structured logging, error handling, reprocessing strategies, APIs, flat files, databases, message queues, event streaming, event sourcing etc.
Automated testing (ideally TDD), pairing/mobbing. Trunk Based Development, Continuous Deployment and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform)
Git and CI/CD for notebooks, data pipelines, and deployments
2. Integration & Data Handling
Experienced in delivering platforms for clients – including file transfer, APIS (REST etc.), SQL/NoSQL/graph databases, JSON, CSV, XML, Parquet etc
Data validation and profiling - assess incoming data quality. Cope with schema drift, deduplication, and reconciliation
Testing and monitoring pipelines: Unit tests for transformations, data checks, and pipeline observability
3. Working Style
Comfortable leveraging the best of lean, agile and waterfall approaches. Can contribute to planning, estimation, and documentation, but also collaborative daily re-prioritisation
Able to explain technical decisions to teammates or clients
Documents decisions and keeps stakeholders informed
Comfortable seeking support from other teams for Product, Databricks, Data architecture
Happy to collaborate with Data Science team on complex subsystems
Nice-to-haves
MLflow or light MLOps experience (for the data science touchpoints)
Dbt / dagster / airflow or similar transformation tools
Understanding of security and compliance (esp. around client data)
Past experience in consulting or client-facing roles
Candidate Requirements
5–8 years (minimum 3–4 years hands-on with cloud/data engineering, 1–2 years in Databricks/Azure, and team/project leadership exposure)
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Data Engineering
Job Type: Full-time, Abu Dhabi based