Contract - Senior Azure Data Engineer

Senior/Lead Azure Data Engineer (Contract — 3 Months) Location: Remote (U.S.), core overlap with CST Engagement: Contract only (C2C) — no C2H for this role Start: Immediate | Duration: 3 months (extension possible) Comp: Competitive hourly rate (DOE) About Smartbridge Smartbridge simplifies business transformation across App Development, Automation, Data & Analytics, and Modernization. We build production systems for clients in Energy, Life Sciences, and Food & Beverage. The Opportunity Our project needs a senior/lead who can both design and build modern Azure data platforms—someone with strong coding in T-SQL and Python/PySpark, architectural judgment, and deep database chops (modeling, performance, reliability). Because this is contract-only, fit must be tight and immediate impact. What You’ll Own (Architecture + Build) Architecture: Define the target-state Azure data architecture (ingestion, orchestration, storage zones, serving patterns), security/networking boundaries, cost/perf tradeoffs, and promotion strategy (Dev Test Prod). Pipelines & Code: Implement robust ELT/ETL with ADF/Synapse Pipelines (parameters, reusable templates, CI/CD). Hands-on in T-SQL and Python/PySpark for transformations, utilities, and tests. Database Excellence: Physical/semantic modeling, partitioning, columnstore strategies, statistics management, query plan analysis, index design, concurrency & transaction isolation, workload management. Observability & Reliability: SLA/SLO definitions, Azure Monitor / Log Analytics / App Insights dashboards and alerts; error handling, retries/backoff, idempotency, CDC and schema drift strategies. Security & Governance: RBAC, Key Vault, managed identities, private endpoints/VNet, data masking patterns; document data contracts and access patterns. Leadership: Code reviews, PR discipline, mentoring, and crisp documentation/runbooks for client handoff. Must-Have (Senior-Level) Experience 8–12+ years in data engineering (recent Azure focus). Expert with ADF (linked services, datasets, IRs—including self-hosted), Synapse (SQL pools/serverless, pipelines), and ADLS/Blob. T-SQL: advanced query tuning, execution plan analysis, windowing, TVFs/stored procs, temp tables vs CTE tradeoffs, cardinality estimator know-how. Python/PySpark: production data transforms, packaging, and testing. CI/CD: Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions (multi-stage releases, approvals, infra + data deployments). Proven delivery of production-grade platforms at scale (TB-level data, strict SLAs). Not a fit: Primarily BI/reporting backgrounds without strong pipeline/build + DB performance experience. Nice to Have Designed and implemented robust data validation procedures to verify the completeness of data transfers, ensuring all records were successfully migrated and proactively triggering alerts in cases of discrepancies. Experience with working with large SQL tables (100 million rows) IaC (Bicep/Terraform) for data resources. Event-driven integration (Service Bus/Event Grid, CDC tooling). Certs: DP-203 or AZ-204 are a plus. 2U2B3thGT2