Our Why
Datacom works with organisations and communities across Australia and New Zealand to make a difference in people’s lives and help organisations use the power of tech to innovate and grow.
About the Role (your why)
As part of our Datapay product team, the Principal Engineer – Data role is a senior technical leadership position responsible for architecting and building the data platform that powers our next-generation payroll product. You will own the technical vision for how we ingest, store, transform, and serve data — from real-time event pipelines and lakehouse storage to embedded analytics and enterprise data access.
This is a greenfield opportunity. We are rethinking our data platform from the ground up — moving away from legacy batch architectures toward a modern, composable stack built on open standards. Your work will underpin AI-powered features, seamless integrations, and a step-change in reporting performance for our customers. You’ll shape the architecture, influence platform-wide decisions, and build the data engineering capability within the team.
What you’ll do
As Principal Engineer – Data you will be focused on:
- Designing and building a modern, composable data platform on open standards — choosing the right patterns for ingestion, storage, transformation, and query to serve a range of analytical and operational workloads.
- Building real-time streaming data pipelines that deliver near-instant data freshness from source events through to query-ready datasets.
- Creating the data infrastructure that enables AI and agentic capabilities — on-demand compute, isolated query environments, and semantic layers that make data accessible to both humans and intelligent systems.
- Enabling enterprise customers to securely access their payroll data inside their own BI tools, without data duplication or added operational overhead.
- Implementing fine-grained authorisation across the data layer — multi-tenant isolation, role-based access, and sensitive data handling that meet the strict privacy requirements of payroll.
- Building layered data transformation models that power reports, and analytics — from raw event streams through to curated, business-ready datasets.
- Defining and enforcing data contracts across domain teams, treating data as a product with clear ownership, quality standards, and SLAs.
- Championing data sovereignty, immutability, and point-in-time query capabilities for audit and compliance.
- Leading the technical relationship with external data platform partners, ensuring effective knowledge transfer and growing internal capability.
- Mentoring engineers, establishing data engineering practices, and contributing to architectural decisions across the broader platform.
We are a pretty agile company, and are keen to respond to customer, technology, and internal stakeholders’ changing requirements — this can mean we evolve in our roles to meet those needs.
What you’ll bring
- Required experience:
- Deep experience with modern data engineering — data lakes or lakehouses, columnar storage formats, and layered transformation architectures.
- Strong SQL skills and hands-on experience with analytical query engines.
- Experience building and operating real-time or near-real-time data pipelines using event streaming platforms.
- Familiarity with data transformation frameworks and an understanding of data contracts and schema governance.
- Proficiency with cloud data infrastructure (Azure preferred) — object storage, container orchestration, secrets management, and monitoring.
- Strong understanding of multi-tenant data security — tenant isolation, role-based access control, PII handling, and data sovereignty requirements.
- Experience designing data platforms that serve both operational and analytical workloads — you know the difference between ELT and ETL and when each pattern applies.
- Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript for pipeline development and automation.
- Track record of making sound architectural decisions in ambiguous, greenfield environments.
- Excellent communication skills — you can translate complex data architecture decisions into language that product, security, and leadership stakeholders understand.
- Nice to have:
- Experience with event-sourced systems and CQRS patterns.
- Familiarity with embedded or on-demand analytical query engines.
- Experience with open data sharing protocols and enterprise BI connectivity.
- Understanding of AI/ML data requirements — semantic layers, agent data access patterns, and how to make data AI-ready.
- Experience with fine-grained or policy-based authorisation frameworks.
- Experience with real-time data ingestion, change data capture (CDC), or streaming-first architectures.
- Background in payroll, HR tech, or regulated data environments with strict compliance and privacy requirements.
- Engagement with the modern data engineering community or contributions to open-source data projects.
Why join us here at Datacom?
Datacom is one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest suppliers of Information Technology professional services. We have managed to maintain a dynamic, agile, small business feel that is often diluted in larger organisations of our size. It's our people that give Datacom its unique culture and energy that you can feel from the moment you meet with us.
We care about our people and provide a range of perks such as social events, chill-out spaces, remote working, flexi-hours and professional development courses to name a few. You’ll have the opportunity to learn, develop your career, connect and bring your true self to work. You will be recognised and valued for your contributions and be able to do your work in a collegial, flat-structured environment.
We operate at the forefront of technology to help Australia and New Zealand’s largest enterprise organisations explore possibilities and solve their greatest challenges, so you will never run out of interesting new challenges and opportunities.
We want Datacom to be an inclusive and welcoming workplace for everyone, and take pride in the steps we have taken — and continue to take — to make our environment fun and friendly, and our people feel supported.