Lead Data Engineer - Team *instinctools

*instinctools is a software development company that provides custom software solutions for businesses of all sizes. Our team works closely with clients to understand their specific needs and provide personalized solutions that meet their business requirements.

*instinctools is looking for a Lead Data Engineer for one of our clients.

Location: Bangalore

Work mode: Hybrid (3 days a week in the office)

Working time zone: IST

Client is a dynamic, fast-paced global platform dedicated to reimagining the movement of people and goods in real time. Driven by a relentless mission to facilitate transport, delivery, and flexible earning opportunities, the company has evolved from a ride-hailing service into a comprehensive ecosystem that handles everything from everyday mobility to multi-ton freight, meals, and essential medical supplies. With a strong commitment to continuous innovation, safety, and transparency.

Project: Owns the data engineering team’s roadmap, platform architecture, and stakeholder/vendor relationships.

Responsibilities and Tasks:

• Team management; Delivery Leadership: Experienced in managing a medium-to-large team of data engineers; own JIRA sprint planning and agile project management.
• Stakeholder Management: Own client relationship / stakeholder management in an onsite-offshore delivery model.
• Platform Architecture: Own data modeling/storage strategy, pipeline orchestration, and governance/security standards across the platform, setting them as team-wide best practices.
• Maintenance & Reliability: Own capacity planning, backup/upgrade strategy, and incident escalation processes across the team’s pipelines and infrastructure.
• Team Enablement: Guide the team on tool and technology selection (e.g., data integration tools, cloud platforms) and mentor engineers on best practices.

Our expectations of the ideal candidate:

• Education: Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree preferred.
• Experience: 7+ years in data engineering, including 2+ years managing a team of roughly 4–10+ engineers and owning platform architecture decisions.
• Technical Skills: Full command of the Senior-level stack, plus experience evaluating and selecting data platform vendors and tools (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, cloud-native ML platforms) at an organizational level.
• Domain: Deep expertise in MLOps/data-platform architecture, including feature pipelines, model training data platforms, and inference-serving layers.
• Leadership: Proven experience running JIRA/agile sprint planning for an engineering team; owns client relationship and stakeholder management in an onsite-offshore delivery model; experience assessing and interviewing engineering candidates.
  AI Literacy & Enablement:
• AI engineering strategy: building a data platform that reliably and scalably supports AI product development.
• AI-first platform design: architects and governs AI-ready data infrastructure — real-time and batch feature pipelines, model training data platforms, vector databases, and inference serving layers.
• AI tooling governance: evaluates, approves, and governs the use of AI engineering tools across the team; balances productivity gains against data security, compliance, and reliability risks.
• AI literacy programme: drives a structured AI upskilling programme for the engineering team; identifies capability gaps, commissions training, and mentors senior engineers on AI-native engineering practices.
• Vendor & ecosystem partnerships: leads evaluation of AI-native data platform vendors (e.g. Databricks, Snowflake AI, Google Vertex AI, AWS SageMaker); negotiates commercial and technical terms aligned with client’s needs.

Nice to have:

• Cloud architect-level certification; agile/Scrum leadership certification (e.g., CSM, PMI-ACP).

English: Upper-Intermediate or higher

We offer:

• Work on a product for a global leader in mobility and logistics — a strong addition to your CV and an opportunity to solve complex challenges at worldwide scale.

• Direct, transparent employment with a local legal entity (INSTINCTOOLS INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED): correct payroll, correct tax withholding, full compliance — no intermediaries between you and the company

• A real team, not a staffing bench: we do regular team events, you get a buddy to help you onboard, you can talk to your delivery manager directly, and you’ll have ongoing support from both the project and the company — with a local manager right here in India

• Structured feedback: a regular 1:1 cadence with your delivery manager and collected feedback from the client’s product leads

• Learning opportunities, seminars and conferences and time for exploring new technologies

Important Notice Regarding Your Personal Data Security

Thank you for your attention and cooperation.