Principal Data Engineer

The details:

• Permanent Full Time | 9 day fortnight
• \(117,990pa up to \)125,339pa + 12% super (level 7)
• 72.5 hour fortnight
• Hybrid, flexible working environment, including some work from home days.
• Location: Strathpine, close to train station and onsite parking

Join City of Moreton Bay as a Principal Data Engineer and help shape and enhance our communities for today and tomorrow.

The City of Moreton Bay is embarking on one of the most ambitious digital transformation programs in local government. At the centre is our City Brain initiative, a bold vision to unify data, intelligence, and innovation to better serve our community.

We're looking for a Principal Data Engineer (Microsoft Fabric) who will be the technical authority and driving force behind our modern data ecosystem. If you're passionate about architecture, governance, and building scalable, high‑impact data platforms, this is the role where you'll shape the future.

As our Principal Data Engineer, you will lead the end‑to‑end design, governance, and optimisation of the Microsoft Fabric platform, ensuring OneLake becomes the trusted, unified data foundation powering analytics, Copilot, AI/ML, and real‑time insights across the council.

You'll guide the operational model, champion engineering excellence, and build high‑performing data products and pipelines that enable smarter decisions for the City.

Key responsibilities include:

• Oversee workspace design, capacity planning and cost management.
• Implement enterprise data governance and security using Microsoft Purview.
• Build scalable data products and high‑performance ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Optimise Spark workloads and ensure reliable DataOps monitoring and SLAs.
• Modernise legacy data pipelines and migrate workloads into Fabric.
• Support AI/ML by enabling feature stores and MLOps workflows.
• Lead API and integration standards and own Fabric CI/CD processes.
• Set engineering standards, mentor the team and drive innovation across Fabric.
• Design, own, and govern enterprise‑grade semantic models in Microsoft Fabric, ensuring consistent business definitions, performance optimisation, security, and reuse across analytics, Power BI, and AI workloads.
• Partner with senior stakeholders, vendors and Microsoft specialists to deliver enterprise data platform outcomes.

To succeed in this role, you will have:

• Significant hands on data engineering expertise, supported by solid leadership experience in advanced technical roles.
• Advanced technical capability across the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem (OneLake, Lakehouse/Delta, Spark, Data Factory, Eventstreams, Power BI).
• Strong Python and SQL proficiency.
• Expertise in Purview governance, hybrid ingestion patterns, and distributed systems.
• Experience with CI/CD, DataOps, and IaC practices.
• Ability to influence, mentor, and lead multidisciplinary teams.
• Experience with MLOps, feature engineering, and geospatial data (highly desirable).
• Microsoft certifications beneficial or in progress.

Position Description_Principal Data Engineer - Fabric.pdf

Why City of Moreton Bay?

What you do with your life matters. It's the same with your career.

We're the third-largest council in Australia and one of the fastest-growing areas. As Australia's newest city, we're building something that's never been done before: a new kind of city, inspired and empowered