A core expectation is disciplined, auditable access administration: BigQuery and Dataplex govern PII and sensitive data across the platform, so this role's IAM and policy-tag work needs to hold up to governance and compliance scrutiny, done in partnership with the Data Governance and Cloud Security teams on standards.
WHAT THIS ROLE OWNS
Ingestion reliability — monitoring, triage, and troubleshooting for Fivetran connectors feeding BigQuery.
BigQuery platform administration — IAM, service accounts, cost and performance management, project/dataset structure.
BigQuery best practices and feature adoption — advising the team on patterns, performance, and cost, and evaluating new platform features.
Dataplex governance and security — user-level permissions, PII masking, and policy tag administration, executed in partnership with Data Governance (standards) and Cloud Security (access-control policy).
ELT pipeline integrity and performance — making sure data flows correctly and efficiently from ingestion through BigQuery.
Runbooks and operational hardening across the tools this role manages.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Ingestion & platform administration
Monitor Fivetran connectors; investigate warnings, failures, delays, and abnormal load behaviour into BigQuery.
Administer BigQuery — IAM, service-account patterns, dataset/project structure, cost visibility and optimisation.
Manage the full user lifecycle (onboarding, role changes, offboarding) for BigQuery and Dataplex access.
BigQuery best practices & feature adoption
Advise Data Engineering and Analytics teams on BigQuery best practices — partitioning, clustering, query optimisation, and cost management.
Track new BigQuery and GCP platform features and drive adoption where they improve reliability, performance, or cost.
Maintain internal guidance and documentation on BigQuery patterns and standards for the wider team to follow.
Dataplex governance & security
Administer Dataplex policy tags and taxonomies for PII and sensitive-data masking at the column level.
Grant and audit user-level BigQuery/Dataplex access (Fine-Grained Reader, Masked Reader, and equivalent roles) against least-privilege principles.
Partner with the Data Governance team, who set PII classification standards and policy-tag taxonomy; this role implements and administers the technical configuration.
Partner with the Cloud Security team on IAM and access-control standards, ensuring BigQuery/Dataplex configuration aligns with company-wide security policy.
ELT pipeline integrity & performance
Monitor data integrity and performance end to end, from Fivetran ingestion through BigQuery, catching completeness and freshness issues before they reach downstream consumers.
Monitor BigQuery job and query performance underlying downstream transformation and reporting, flagging issues to Data Engineering or Business Intelligence when the root cause sits in their layer.
Incident response & hardening
Act as primary point of contact for ingestion and BigQuery platform incidents — freshness issues, schema drift, load failures — during business hours; this is not a formal on-call rotation.
Lead root-cause analysis for recurring ingestion/platform issues; convert findings into durable fixes and runbooks.
Create and maintain operational documentation — runbooks, escalation paths, and recovery procedures for the tools this role manages.
REQUIRED EXPERIENCE
Core platform & tooling (must-have)
Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, especially BigQuery, in a production environment.
Deep enough BigQuery knowledge to advise others on best practices and evaluate new platform features for adoption, including cost optimisation (partitioning, clustering, slot management).
Hands-on experience with Dataplex — policy tags, taxonomies, PII/column-level masking, and fine-grained IAM roles.
Experience with GCP IAM, service accounts, and least-privilege access administration.
Comfortable working in a regulated or PII-sensitive data environment (e.g. GDPR, HIPAA, or equivalent), given this role's direct exposure to sensitive-data controls.
Ingestion & reliability
Experience operating or supporting an ELT ingestion tool such as Fivetran, Airbyte, or CData, with an eye for data integrity and pipeline performance.
Experience with monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis in a production data environment.
3+ years in data platform or cloud platform operations roles.
Data fundamentals
Strong SQL skills; enough data-modelling fluency to troubleshoot across raw, staging, and mart layers without owning the modelling itself.
Operational excellence
Strong documentation and runbook discipline.
Proven ability to use the GCP CLI and scripting (Python or Bash) to automate platform administration and access workflows.
PREFERRED EXPERIENCE (NICE-TO-HAVE)
Familiarity with dbt — environments, scheduling, and access administration.
Familiarity with Tableau or a comparable BI platform — enough to recognise when a downstream issue traces back to a data source.
Experience supporting Salesforce, NetSuite, or other business-system data pipelines.
Experience in a SaaS environment with high expectations for data freshness and business continuity.
Relevant Google Cloud certification (e.g. Professional Data Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect).
SolarWinds is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. SolarWinds will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.
All applications are treated in accordance with the SolarWinds Privacy Notice: https://www.solarwinds.com/applicant-privacy-notice
