Lead Specialist, Data Lakehouse II

About Maaden

Founded in 1997, Maaden has grown into one of the world’s fastest-expanding mining organizations and the largest multi-commodity mining and metals company in the Middle East. The company is helping advance Saudi Arabia’s mining sector into a key economic pillar by creating a fully integrated, world-class mining value chain. This opportunity is part of that broader ambition and offers the chance to contribute to the Kingdom’s future mining landscape.

Role Overview

The Lead Specialist, Data Lakehouse II is responsible for delivering, running, and improving lakehouse platform capabilities that enable large-scale data ingestion, storage, processing, and controlled access across the enterprise. The role focuses on ensuring dependable analytics and reporting through consistent architectural patterns, performance tuning, security controls, and cost-efficient operations.

This position partners with platform engineering, data engineering, and governance teams to build controls into the platform, maintain operational reliability, and support delivery teams with architecture guidance and implementation direction.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and refine lakehouse architecture patterns across ingestion, raw and curated layers, and data products with a focus on scalability, maintainability, and reuse.
• Improve compute and storage efficiency using approaches such as partitioning, file format selection, indexing, caching, and workload management while supporting service-level targets for priority use cases.
• Apply governance from the ground up by integrating security, access management, classification controls, and auditability into platform standards.
• Support ingestion and transformation workflows by advising on orchestration, reliability design, and error-handling practices.
• Set up and maintain operational monitoring, including health checks, pipeline visibility, capacity tracking, and cost monitoring, while driving improvements in incident and problem management.
• Work with data modeling and governance stakeholders to ensure metadata, lineage, and data quality controls are consistently applied across lakehouse assets.
• Provide technical direction to specialists and vendors, conduct design reviews, and uphold platform standards across delivery workstreams.
• Help shape the platform roadmap and continuous improvement agenda by assessing new capabilities and recommending adoption based on enterprise needs.

Minimum Qualifications

A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a closely related discipline is required.

Experience Required

Applicants should bring 7 to 10 years of experience in data engineering and modern data platforms, including practical hands-on work with lakehouse environments. Experience running production platforms with responsibilities covering reliability, security, and cost optimization is also necessary.

Competencies

• Ownership & Accountability: Takes full responsibility for delivery and outcomes.
• Collaboration: Works smoothly with engineering, governance, and business stakeholders.
• Execution Excellence: Produces reliable, high-quality solutions.
• Continuous Improvement: Regularly improves performance, cost, and operability.
• Impact & Influence: Provides technical leadership that helps shape decisions across teams and vendors.

Skills and Experience

• Practical knowledge of lakehouse architectures, data processing engines, and cloud-based storage and compute optimization.
• Strong grasp of data governance, security, and access-control practices in platform environments.
• Experience with operational excellence practices such as monitoring, incident handling, root-cause analysis, and ongoing improvement.
• Ability to develop reference architectures and guide multiple delivery teams effectively.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to manage stakeholders across engineering, governance, and data consumer groups.