Lead Technical Consultant - Level 3 (Data Platform Engineer)
Location: Remote (RTP, NC preferred)
Pay Rate: $95 - $115/hour (W2 only)
Important:
- No sponsorship is available for this role.
- We cannot work with third-party vendors or C2C candidates. Candidates must be able to work directly on Alphanumeric's W2.
About the Role
Alphanumeric is hiring a Lead Technical Consultant - Level 3 (Data Platform Engineer) to support our client of 20+ years, a global leader committed to improving lives through medical and pharmaceutical innovation.
This team operates as a full-stack data and platform engineering organization, spanning product and portfolio leadership, data engineering, infrastructure & DevOps, AI/ML platforms, and advanced analytics environments.
Their mission is to transform how scientific and enterprise data is leveraged by:
- Building next-generation, metadata-driven data platforms to reduce time spent on 'data mechanics'.
- Delivering best-in-class AI/ML environments to accelerate predictive capabilities.
- Engineering data at scale as a unified, real-time asset.
- Automating end-to-end data pipelines across high-throughput domains (genomics, multi-omics, etc.).
- Enabling governance-by-design for internal and external data.
- Creating domain-specific data products for computational scientists.
- Supporting full traceability and data provenance.
- Driving scalable, reusable, and efficient data engineering practices.
Position Overview
As a Data Platform Engineer, you will take full ownership of delivering scalable, high-impact data platform solutions-from problem definition through deployment and ongoing operations.
You will act as a technical leader and mentor, setting the standard for engineering excellence while contributing hands-on to development. This role requires a strong balance of architecture, coding, platform engineering, and operational excellence.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and maintain cloud-native data platform solutions.
- Develop reusable frameworks and components to accelerate data product development.
- Own end-to-end delivery of platform services, including monitoring and optimization.
- Implement observability, performance tuning, and reliability improvements.
- Define and track metrics to measure platform performance and impact.
- Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership across projects.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with data engineers, scientists, and platform teams.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and maintain cloud-native data platform solutions.
- Develop reusable frameworks and components to accelerate data product development.
- Own end-to-end delivery of platform services, including monitoring and optimization.
- Implement observability, performance tuning, and reliability improvements.
- Define and track metrics to measure platform performance and impact.
- Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership across projects.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with data engineers, scientists, and platform teams.
Core Skills & Experience:
- Strong experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)including:
- Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Storage, Artifact Registry, IAM.
- Advanced Python development (automation, tooling, pipelines).
- Hands-on experience with Docker:
- Multi-stage builds, image optimization, security best practices.
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for containerized environments.
- Strong background in debugging and observability:
- Logging, monitoring, distributed tracing (Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, etc.)
- Proven ability to diagnose and resolve performance issues in cloud-native systems.
Preferred / Bonus Skills:
- Experience with Nextflow (workflow orchestration).
- Exposure to bioinformatics / genomics / multi-omics / imaging pipelines.
- Experience with GCP Batch for large-scale workloads.
Education & Experience:
- Bachelor's degree with 8+ years of experience, or
- Master's degree with 5+ years of experience
Why Join?
- Work on cutting-edge data platforms in life sciences and healthcare.
- Contribute to real-world impact in biopharmaceutical development.
- Collaborate with top-tier engineering and scientific talent.
- Be part of a team driving innovation at scale.