Lead Specialist, Data Lakehouse

Role Overview

Lead Specialist, Data Lakehouse at Ma'aden, based in Saudi Arabia. This role delivers, operates, and optimizes lakehouse platform capabilities to support scalable ingestion, storage, processing, and governed consumption of enterprise data.

Company Overview

Ma'aden, established in 1997, is one of the fastest-growing mining companies in the world and the largest multi-commodity mining and metals company in the Middle East. The company is leading the development of the mining industry to become the third pillar of Saudi Arabia's economy by building a world-class, unique, and fully integrated mining value chain.

Role Purpose

The Lead Specialist, Data Lakehouse ensures the lakehouse platform enables reliable analytics and reporting by applying standard patterns for data layers, performance tuning, security, and cost management. The role works closely with platform engineering, data engineering, and governance teams to embed controls, ensure operational excellence, and support delivery teams with reference architectures and implementation guidance.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Platform Design

• Implement and enhance lakehouse architecture patterns (ingestion, raw/curated layers, data products) ensuring scalability, maintainability, and reuse.
• Contribute to platform roadmap and continuous improvement, evaluating new features and recommending adoption aligned to enterprise needs.
• Create reference architectures and support multiple delivery teams effectively.

Performance & Optimization

• Optimize performance of compute and storage through partitioning, file formats, indexing, caching, and workload management; ensure SLAs for priority use cases.

Governance & Security

• Embed governance-by-design by integrating security, access controls, classification handling, and auditability into platform patterns.
• Collaborate with data modeling and governance teams to ensure metadata, lineage, and data quality controls are systematically applied to lakehouse assets.

Operations & Support

• Support ingestion and transformation pipelines by providing platform guidance on orchestration, reliability patterns, and error handling.
• Define and maintain operational monitoring (health checks, pipeline observability, capacity, costs) and drive incident/problem management improvements.

Leadership & Standards

• Provide technical leadership to specialists and vendors; perform design reviews and enforce platform standards across delivery initiatives.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
• 7–10 years of experience in data engineering and modern data platforms with hands-on lakehouse experience.
• Experience operating production platforms with reliability, security, and cost optimization responsibilities.

Skills & Competencies

• Hands-on experience with lakehouse architectures, data processing engines, and cloud storage/compute optimization.
• Strong understanding of data governance, security, and access control requirements as applied to platforms.
• Operational excellence: monitoring, incident management, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management across engineering, governance, and consumers.
• Ownership and accountability—takes end-to-end ownership for delivery and outcomes.
• Collaboration—works effectively across engineering, governance, and business teams.
• Execution excellence—delivers robust solutions with strong quality and reliability.
• Continuous improvement—improves performance, cost, and operability over time.
• Impact and influence—guides teams and vendors through technical leadership.