Lead Specialist, Data Lakehouse II

About Maaden

Maaden, 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. We are 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. We are pleased to share an exciting opportunity for the below mentioned position. This role offers a chance to contribute to our ambitious growth and play a key part in shaping the future of mining in the Kingdom.

Job purpose

The Lead Specialist, Data Lakehouse II delivers, operates, and optimizes lakehouse platform capabilities to support scalable ingestion, storage, processing, and governed consumption of enterprise data. The role ensures the lakehouse enables reliable analytics and reporting by applying standard patterns for data layers, performance tuning, security, and cost management.

The position 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 Accountabilities

1. Implement and enhance lakehouse architecture patterns (ingestion, raw/curated layers, data products) ensuring scalability, maintainability, and reuse.
2. Optimize performance of compute and storage through partitioning, file formats, indexing, caching, and workload management; ensure SLAs for priority use cases.
3. Embed governance-by-design by integrating security, access controls, classification handling, and auditability into platform patterns.
4. Support ingestion and transformation pipelines by providing platform guidance on orchestration, reliability patterns, and error handling.
5. Define and maintain operational monitoring (health checks, pipeline observability, capacity, costs) and drive incident/problem management improvements.
6. Collaborate with data modeling and governance teams to ensure metadata, lineage, and data quality controls are systematically applied to lakehouse assets.
7. Provide technical leadership to specialists and vendors; perform design reviews and enforce platform standards across delivery initiatives.
8. Contribute to platform roadmap and continuous improvement, evaluating new features and recommending adoption aligned to enterprise needs.

Minimum Qualification, Experience and Competencies

Minimum Qualification

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.

Minimum Experience

• 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.

Maaden High Performance Competencies

• Ownership & 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 & Influence – Guides teams and vendors through technical leadership.

Skills

• 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.
• Ability to create reference architectures and support multiple delivery teams effectively.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management across engineering, governance, and consumers.