Senior Data Engineer

About us

Synergia is a consulting firm specialising in data analytics, evaluation, service design, and social investment. For more than 25 years, we've supported organisations across New Zealand | Aotearoa to make informed, evidence-based decisions that improve health, social, education, and justice outcomes.

We're a close-knit, multidisciplinary team of data scientists, evaluators, service designers, and clinicians. We value collaboration, intellectual curiosity, and a commitment to meaningful work. Our office is based in central Auckland next to the Karangahape CRL station.

About the role

We're looking for a Data Engineer to strengthen the technical backbone of our analytics offering: building, automating, and maintaining the data pipelines that feed our client work. You'll sit at the intersection of engineering and consulting, developing ETL/ELT processes across our data infrastructure while staying close enough to client projects to understand what the data actually needs to do.

Requirements rarely arrive fully specified. Client data sources are often messy or undocumented, and priorities shift as projects evolve; you'll need to scope pipelines from ambiguous starting points, communicate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders, and move between several projects at different stages of maturity.

Work is predominantly office-based, reflecting our commitment to in-person collaboration, with work-from-home days also available.

Job tasks and responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines that validate, standardise, and integrate data from diverse client sources into our data warehouse.
• Automate data quality checks and documentation so pipelines stay reproducible and maintainable by others.
• Work with client data managers to resolve data issues, understand system constraints, and translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Support the wider quantitative analysis cycle when required: cleaning, structuring, and preparing data for analysis and reporting.
• Contribute technical input to client-facing conversations, scoping documents, and funding or sales proposals.
• Manage your own workload across multiple concurrent projects, each with a different client, data maturity, and level of ambiguity.

Skills and experience

The below are not all mandatory; we're as interested in your ability to learn and adapt as your existing toolkit.

• Degree in data science, computer science, statistics, or a related quantitative field, with around three or more years of relevant experience.
• Strong SQL skills; practical experience building and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Experience with modern cloud-based data infrastructure and data warehousing.
• Proficiency in Python and/or R for data processing; familiarity with Polars, pandas or the tidyverse is a plus.
• Knowledge of version control (Git).
• Confidence explaining technical decisions to non-technical audiences, including clients.
• Prior consulting or client-facing experience
• A track record of managing shifting priorities and incomplete specifications without losing momentum.

Our preferred candidate may also have:

• Knowledge of AWS and Snowflake.
• Experience with health, social or government sector data, where privacy and data governance carry particular weight
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g. Terraform) or workflow orchestration.

Personal attributes or interests

• Self-motivated and comfortable operating with a degree of ambiguity.
• A pragmatic problem-solver: someone who'll flag a data issue and propose a fix.
• Strong communicator, able to build trust with clients and colleagues alike.
• Genuine interest in the health and social sectors.
• Alignment with, and commitment to, Synergia's values.

Additional information

• You must have full rights to work in New Zealand.
• Referees will be requested prior to appointment.
• Police vetting will be required.

How to apply

Please apply via SEEK with your CV and a cover letter outlining your relevant experience and motivation for applying. Applications close Monday 14 September @ 8:00