About the role

Senior Data Engineer
Contract through to June 2026
Christchurch

Work on data that actually changes things for people across Aotearoa. This role sits in a large, mission-led organisation, building and running the data platforms that underpin smarter decisions at scale.

You’ll join a delivery-focused team, take a technical lead role, and stay close to the code: designing, building, and optimising modern data solutions in a genuinely collaborative environment.

The role

• Lead the design and build of scalable data pipelines and platforms
• Own and improve data engineering best practice across the team
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring while remaining hands-on
• Work closely with cross-functional stakeholders to turn complex requirements into robust, production-grade data solutions

What you’ll bring
You’re a senior data engineer who’s comfortable owning technical decisions, coaching others, and getting deep into the detail of pipelines, performance, and reliability.
You’ll need:

• Strong, practical experience across the Databricks ecosystem
  • Delta Lake, Notebooks, SQL/PySQL, Python, PySpark, Pandas, Unity Catalog
• Proven experience designing and building ETL/ELT pipelines
  • Ideally within a medallion / lakehouse-style architecture
• Hands-on experience with orchestration, monitoring and optimisation of Spark workloads
• Experience implementing CI/CD for data (ideally using Azure DevOps)
• Solid grounding in core data engineering patterns: ingestion, transformation, data quality, storage
• Demonstrated ability to mentor, set technical direction and support good engineering practice
• Experience working in Agile delivery teams

Nice to have

• Exposure to modern cloud data warehouses
  • e.g. Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Azure Synapse, Azure SQL
• Experience building semantic models and dashboards in tools like Power BI or Tableau

Why this role

• High-impact, public-purpose work
• Tight-knit, supportive team with strong engineering practices
• Flexible working options
• Christchurch-based; must have current NZ work rights

Contractor benefits (via Potentia)

• Wellbeing Discovery Sessions
• Welcome Packs
• Hnry discount
• Exclusive invites to industry events
• Optional Pay-As-You-Go PI/PL Insurance

Note: We review all CV's manually and you will be contacted if your skills and experience meet the requirements of any of our clients. You must have valid working rights for NZ.

Interested?
Click ‘Apply now’ with your cover letter and most up-to-date CV, or contact Emma at emma@potentia.co.nz for more information.