Brussel, hybrid — 50% on site

Senior / Principal

English required; French a plus

About the Team

We are building a data mesh on Azure and Databricks where domain teams own their data as products, and the central platform team provides a self-serve, governed environment. We have an MVP platform with pilot teams already onboarded. The next phase involves evolving the platform by enhancing what works, reworking what doesn't, and building capabilities for the next wave of domains.

The Role

You will take ownership of the platform, its architecture, and its evolution roadmap, leading the team that builds it. This involves an objective assessment of the current setup, creating a roadmap with the team and stakeholders, and balancing stabilization, cost, and new capabilities. Databricks is central to the platform, requiring deep hands-on expertise.

Responsibilities

• Assess the current platform and develop a prioritized roadmap for stabilization, reworking, and new developments.
• Own and evolve the end-to-end platform architecture, considering cost, resiliency, automation, and security.
• Develop the Databricks architecture, including Unity Catalog design, workspace topology, and performance standards.
• Incrementally evolve the platform, strengthening or reworking components without disrupting existing domains.
• Develop the data product landing zone and guide the team in automating its delivery.
• Define the platform security architecture in collaboration with the security team.
• Drive the data mesh operating model, including domain ownership and data product contracts.
• Architect FinOps, observability, and data quality as platform capabilities.
• Ensure integration with enterprise data governance tools.
• Set infrastructure-as-code and automation standards in Terraform.
• Produce clear architecture documentation and lead the platform team in technical direction and backlog prioritization.
• Collaborate with data product teams and business stakeholders to shape a sequenced platform roadmap.

Success in the First Year

• Establish ownership of the platform's architecture and direction.
• Develop an evidence-based assessment and evolution roadmap within the first quarter.
• Achieve smooth onboarding of new domains with automated, governed environments.
• Stabilize the existing platform with predictable operations and cost optimization.
• Deliver new capabilities as prioritized on the roadmap.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data engineering or platform roles, including 3+ years in architecting production data platforms.
• Strong Azure expertise across the data stack; AWS experience is a bonus.
• Experience designing landing zones or isolated multi-team environments and automating their provisioning.
• Deep, hands-on Databricks expertise, including Unity Catalog design and governance.
• Experience designing security and governance in a cloud data platform.
• Experience building self-serve, domain-oriented data platforms; data mesh implementation preferred.
• Delivered cost visibility, observability, or data quality capabilities on a platform.
• Experience with near real-time architecture and delivery using Event Hubs, Kafka, and Spark Structured Streaming.
• Strong Terraform and automation discipline.
• Clear architecture documentation skills and technical leadership experience.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, Spark, and Terraform. AWS and regulated-industry experience are nice to have.

What We Offer

• A platform-as-a-product culture with a focus on adoption by domain teams.
• Autonomy over architecture decisions and a team that values working code and clear documentation.