Senior Data Engineer

Location: Oklahoma City, OK

Reports to: Manager, Data Systems

Employment Type: Salary, Exempt Full-Time

About Us

Western Natural Resources (WNR) is a privately held, Oklahoma City–based oil and gas company focused on acquiring, developing, and operating high-quality upstream energy assets. Founded through a strategic partnership between Centalion and experienced energy leaders, WNR combines deep industry expertise, disciplined execution, and a long-term approach to building a premier energy company.

WNR is a rapidly growing organization with an entrepreneurial culture where collaboration, integrity, safety, and accountability are central to how we operate. As the company expands its asset base and team, employees have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact, work closely with experienced industry leaders, and help build the infrastructure and culture of a growing energy company.

Position Summary

Western Natural Resources is hiring a Senior Data Engineer to own the Databricks lakehouse behind the company's technical and commercial decisions — the platform that consolidates SCADA, accounting, land, reserves and economics, and third-party well data into a single trusted source, and feeds our operations dashboards, reserves work, and machine learning models.

This is a hands-on role on a small team. You will build the ingestion, transformation, and data-quality layers yourself, and work directly with reservoir engineering, operations, accounting, and land. We build with agentic AI coding tools as a normal part of the workflow and expect use with judgment and results verified against the data.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and operate incremental ingestion pipelines from vendor APIs and federated databases covering production, accounting, land, and reserves - idempotent and safe to re-run
• Own the medallion architecture (bronze, silver, gold) in Databricks Unity Catalog, from raw landing through the tables dashboards and models consume
• Enforce data quality: reconcile against independent sources, and write checks that fail a job rather than publish a bad number
• Own the master well registry and the golden record: resolve identity so one well is recognized consistently across every connected system, and apply survivorship rules that select the best available source for each attribute when systems disagree
• Schedule, size, and monitor production workloads, select the right compute and job configuration to keep pipelines fast and cost-effective, and catch stale or missing data
• Onboard data from acquisitions, new wells and new vendor systems into the existing platform
• Partner with reservoir engineering, operations, accounting, and land to turn business questions into durable datasets, and document what each one means and where it can be trusted

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, MIS, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 5+ years building and operating production data pipelines
• Strong hands-on Python and SQL, with production Apache Spark experience (PySpark and Spark SQL). This role writes code daily.
• Production experience on a cloud data platform; Databricks strongly preferred (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, job orchestration), including sizing compute and tuning Spark jobs for performance and cost
• Experience integrating REST APIs: authentication, pagination, rate limits, and incremental synchronization
• Fluency with incremental data patterns — MERGE/upsert, change data capture, and late-arriving or revised records
• Master data management experience — entity resolution across systems, and survivorship logic that turns conflicting sources into one trusted record
• Working fluency with agentic AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar), and the judgment to know when their output has to be verified
• Git-based version control and code review as a normal part of your workflow
• Ability to work independently in a small-team environment, with strong written communication

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in a related technical field
• Oil and gas industry experience - upstream production and SCADA, revenue and JIB accounting, land and lease records, or reserves and economics
• Familiarity with platforms such as ComboCurve, Aries, Enverus, Enertia, Peloton WellView, or SCADA historians
• Query federation across external databases such as SQL Server or Snowflake
• Building LLM-powered data workflows in production, such as structured extraction from unstructured documents
• Feature engineering or MLOps for production models, and BI tools such as Spotfire or Power BI

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary + performance-based incentives
• Ownership of the company's data platform and direct influence on how WNR makes decisions
• A modern cloud data stack, with real input into the tools and architecture
• Flat, collaborative team structure with fast decision-making

Physical Requirements

Ability to perform the essential functions of the position, including sitting, standing, walking, communicating, and using standard office or job-related equipment. May require lifting, travel, working outdoors, or use of personal protective equipment.